With the release of its live, two-disc album/DVD Tell Your Friends, Snarky Puppy has gone from an underground secret to one of the most internationally respected names in instrumental music, a reputation solidified with its 2014 Grammy win for Best R&B Performance. The band topped the iTunes jazz charts with both its Grammy-winning 2013 release, Family Dinner: Volume One and with the 2014 release of We Like It Here.
Snarky Puppy fuses a deep knowledge of and respect for musical tradition with sonic and conceptual innovation in a way that is able to reach the most critical—or most carefree—of audiences. In her 2010 book The New Face of Jazz, Cicily Janus called the group “one of the most inventive in sound and funk since Maynard Ferguson’s fusion years.”
The core of the group, now based in Brooklyn, features Grammy Award-winners Robert “Sput” Searight on drums (God's Property, Snoop Dogg) and Shaun Martin on keys (Kirk Franklin, Erykah Badu). Led by award-winning bassist/composer Michael League, Snarky Puppy delivers raw funk and sensitive dynamics, relentless pocket and lyrical melodicism, lush harmony and soulful simplicity, and, most importantly, a delicate mixture of composition and improvisation.
