Snarky Puppy is when a jazz trumpeter is celebrated like a rock guitar god. And when the big band resurrects as a chameleon of jazz funk. “Snarky Puppy”, a musicians’ collective that started in 2004 as a college band of music students in Denton/Texas – it sounds like a live chameleon with many heads that shine in all colors of fusion music of the 20th and 21st centuries can.
What the ten musicians around bassist and bandleader Michael League offered in the sold-out Muffathalle was like a firework of metamorphoses: Grooves that wander through all sorts of variations and escalations for ten minutes, only to end up right back where it all began. Soloists who play themselves into the highest spheres, in order to latch themselves back into the arrangement in a completely unexpected and logical way. A new keyboard player – Shaun Martin – who sings with the talk box on the keys and always brings a gospel and hip hop twist to the band’s sound. Multi-instrumentalist Justin Stanton, with whom you don’t know whether to consider him the best trumpeter or the most gifted keyboard soloist. And guitarist Mark Lettieri, who leads the band, which just played jazz, into blues-rock realms with the song “RL’s” – as loud, as wild and as far as Texas.
Dramaturgically, songs by Snarky Puppy develop like film music: motivic, in wide arcs of suspense, which are even more comprehensible and gripping live than on CD or from the stream, because – even in the video monitors behind the stage that feature the respective soloists – you can hear the music not only hears in their opulence, but also sees. In the middle of it all: Michael League, who leads this mighty band from the bass – sometimes gnarly, sometimes nimble as a weasel – with the looks, the eye contact and the happy smile of a gentle conductor. He sometimes shakes his head with the groove as if it were a human beat. In the end, Jamison Ross drums the concert to its climax, letting the beats fly like the dreadlocks on his head. The encore is “Shofukan” before “Snarky Puppy”, those friendliest gods of jazz-funk, leave the stage.