Snarky Puppy

[Durium]

The latest two albums by the US band, Snarky Puppy, formed around bass player Michael League, surpised me, to say the least: Tell Your Friends, recorded in 2009 in a studio for a live audience and the 2011 GroundUP, which was born in a warehouse, refurbished into a real studio. Both were released by MIG-Music at two CD-DVD packages. Its funky, well arranged groovy rhythms and the combination of audio and visual entertainment, made me anxious to share the music of this great collective band ..... which has a reputation, to quote leader Michael League, cramming 20 pounds of material ..... in a ten pound bag.

Tell Your Friends - GroundUP

Durium

[.:.impossible]

I've seen them a couple of times in VA. I think they are from North Texas?

[tranemonk]

I caught a YouTube clip and was VERY impressed. Got their CD and going to see them here in Boston in a month! Looking forward to it. Nice new change of pace.

[kh1958]

Tickets are on sale to fourteen sets over a seven day period.

A mere $200 per set, plus $27 service fee.

Skipping it.

 

[AllenLowe]

this is the point where I say I hate this band, which is the worst kind of white-boy pseudo funk. And then someone else says "Allen is just jealous" and I answer fuck no, I'm still alive and I'm Artist of the Year. You're the one who's jealous.

But they are so awful, jazz's version of bubblegum music, Muzak for someone stuck in the Elevator of Life.

And fuck you, I'm not jealous I am old and secure and happy and breathing and only seeing double on occasion.

 

 

[jlhoots]

29 minutes ago, AllenLowe said:

this is the point where I say I hate this band, which is the worst kind of white-boy pseudo funk. And then someone else says "Allen is just jealous" and I answer fuck no, I'm still alive and I'm Artist of the Year. You're the one who's jealous.

But they are so awful, jazz's version of bubblegum music, Muzak for someone stuck in the Elevator of Life.

And fuck you, I'm not jealous I am old and secure and happy and breathing and only seeing double on occasion.

 

 

[kh1958]

I heard them for about ten or fifteen minutes a few years ago at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Just before their set, the Jazz Tent suddenly filled up with a horde of younger people. Ten minutes in I was on the verge of deciding whether to flee when an incredibly violent thunderstorm struck, resulting in the cancellation of the day's festival early in the set  and sending everybody out into a torrential rainstorm--assuredly the most violent storm I've ever experienced with just a raincoat. I figure this was a sign the band was not for me.

[Rooster_Ties]

1 hour ago, jlhoots said:

[Rabshakeh]

5 hours ago, AllenLowe said:

But they are so awful, jazz's version of bubblegum music

Wouldn't they need to be catchier? I don't hate Culcha Vulcha, but otherwise don't like them at all. Patchworks of ideas, all with that rather saccharine funk behind it.

Snarky Puppy serve as a reminder to me that something is changing with the taste of the generation that is just coming of age now. All of this stuff sounds embarrassingly naff, cloying and boring to my ears, but I can see that there is something that I am not understanding which my 19 year old cousin loves and finds exciting (a biiiig Snarky Puppy fan, intelligent and in love with music, including the jazz "classics", but with no interest in most of what I consider to be 'groundbreaking new jazz').

[Gheorghe]

6 hours ago, AllenLowe said:

this is the point where I say I hate this band, which is the worst kind of white-boy pseudo funk. And then someone else says "Allen is just jealous" and I answer fuck no, I'm still alive and I'm Artist of the Year. You're the one who's jealous.

But they are so awful, jazz's version of bubblegum music, Muzak for someone stuck in the Elevator of Life.

And fuck you, I'm not jealous I am old and secure and happy and breathing and only seeing double on occasion.

 

 

I haven´t even heard about that band. Maybe I´m prejudiced but as I read the name of the band it doesn´t sound like something that might be interesting for me. Well, but pseudo funk, indifferent if white or black is not really my stuff. 
I was into electric jazz, jazz rock, funk in the 70´s when it was the current style of the music, played it until into the 80´s (though I never ceased to love acoustic jazz)...., but that´s all.....

 

[Rabshakeh]

33 minutes ago, Gheorghe said:

I haven´t even heard about that band. Maybe I´m prejudiced but as I read the name of the band it doesn´t sound like something that might be interesting for me. Well, but pseudo funk, indifferent if white or black is not really my stuff. 
I was into electric jazz, jazz rock, funk in the 70´s when it was the current style of the music, played it until into the 80´s (though I never ceased to love acoustic jazz)...., but that´s all.....

Worth listening. Similar world to Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. 

[sidewinder]

Heard a bit of this stuff once and wasn’t interested.

[mhatta]

What I find interesting about recent trends is that people (especially young people) seem to be actively avoiding "exciting" music. I listen to jazz because there is an exciting, adventurous, challenging musicality somewhere in there that is a slap in the face, and that is what makes it appealing for me, but lately (or has it always been?) it seems to me that there is a need for music that is smooth and as resistless as possible.  Snarky Puppy is a good music I think, but not really "exciting" for me.

 

[tranemonk]

I think they are pretty good, not great. Their dominant appeal is to a younger generation which is a good thing in general. Look if this gets some teens and twenty-somethings into jazz... great... If they stick with it, they'll find much much more and become us in 30 years ....

[Rabshakeh]

31 minutes ago, mhatta said:

What I find interesting about recent trends is that people (especially young people) seem to be actively avoiding "exciting" music. I listen to jazz because there is an exciting, adventurous, challenging musicality somewhere in there that is a slap in the face, and that is what makes it appealing for me, but lately (or has it always been?) it seems to me that there is a need for music that is smooth and as resistless as possible.  Snarky Puppy is a good music I think, but not really "exciting" for me.

I think the same. The strange tendancy towards music that appears "tame".

Disney themes, K Pop, film music soundtracks all seem to have an appeal that I would never have imagined when I was a teenager. High emotion, cinematic music that from my perspective seems sappy and inauthentic. I think that part of it may be the result of younger people having come up in a world with access to everything except for context with the result that questions of authenticity and excitement may have a different meaning to them.

That said, there is a lot of "high resistance" music out there. New genres of rap or electronic music that are very abrasive and which are made by the youngest cohorts. 

[Teasing the Korean]

Never heard them.  They seem like precisely the kind of thing I would avoid.

[BillF]

It's music for people who dislike the sort of music I like.

Edited March 3, 2022 by BillF

[AllenLowe]

I was basically just goofing around, but I did mean it when I said how much I dislike the group.

[Dan Gould]

"Snarky Puppy" and "Mostly Other People Do the Killing" are two band names that would be/are total turn-offs for me.  

 

18 minutes ago, BillF said:

It's music for people who dislike the sort of music I like.

I think Bill nailed it for me.

[AllenLowe]

27 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

"Snarky Puppy" and "Mostly Other People Do the Killing" are two band names that would be/are total turn-offs for me.  

 

I think Bill nailed it for me.

I used to call them "Mostly Other Musicians Do the Playing."

[Peter Friedman]

1 hour ago, BillF said:

It's music for people who dislike the sort of music I like.

What Bill said!

[Rooster_Ties]

1 hour ago, BillF said:

It's music for people who dislike the sort of music I like.

That’s sort of a good way of putting it.

I’ve only sampled some clips from YouTube, but they’re SO damn slick, and — to my ears, at least — bereft of soul… of solos and soloists who want to try and say something — rather than just blow.

TONS of chops, I’ll give ‘em that. But there’s just something lacking.

I feel like if I could find just one Snarky Puppy release that showcased them maximally playing to the strengths *I* like best — that I’d still be hard-pressed to play them more than a time or two every several years.

I’m a little more bully for Go Go Penguin — but it’s a similar kind of thing. And much as I hate to say it, I get a little of the same feeling out of Medeski Martin & Wood (much as I do love a lot of aspects of what MMW does, and I’ve heard them live 3x though that was all 10+ years ago).

Most slick fusion from the late 70’s thru the 90’s hits me the same way — just cold.

[JSngry]

2 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

That’s sort of a good way of putting it.

I’ve only sampled some clips from YouTube, but they’re SO damn slick, and — to my ears, at least — bereft of soul… of solos and soloists who want to try and say something — rather than just blow.

TONS of chops, I’ll give ‘em that. But there’s just something lacking.

I feel like if I could find just one Snarky Puppy release that showcased them maximally playing to the strengths *I* like best — that I’d still be hard-pressed to play them more than a time or two every several years.

I’m a little more bully for Go Go Penguin — but it’s a similar kind of thing. And much as I hate to say it, I get a little of the same feeling out of Medeski Martin & Wood (much as I do love a lot of aspects of what MMW does, and I’ve heard them live 3x though that was all 10+ years ago).

Most slick fusion from the late 70’s thru the 90’s hits me the same way — just cold.

Hey, Denton does it again.

They were presented as something new and different, and sorry, they are neither...

...at least not for anybody who had been even semi-paying attention to the various strands of Club Jazz/Acid Jazz/Whatever Jazz. It's a natural set of musical intersections, and I certainly like a lot of what has come of it, but geez, Snarky Puppy - and their audience - was SO far behind the curve on that that they all just make me laugh.

I don't begrudge them their success, but it's the triumph of an extremely myopic audience provincialism.

Whether or not it realizes it, the world is still catching up with Monday Michiru.

[jcam_44]

Chris Potter solo with them is insane. I'm only tangentially aware of them due to Bob Reynolds association with them. They don't offend me like they appear to so many others her but they don't get my dollars either. Good for them doing what they are doing though. The "live" record in the studio thing is interesting and I would like to check out artists I like doing that, but not them. 

Chris Potter solo

Edited March 3, 2022 by jcam_44

[HutchFan]

Everything doesn't have to be revolutionary.

 

I don't really know their music.  I'm just sayin'.

 

Edited March 3, 2022 by HutchFan