Mike League and the making of Snarky Puppy

Mike League after a Snarky Puppy show in Dallas.

Snarky Puppy, the Grammy award-winning band, is well known and fills up arenas all across the U.S., Europe and Asia. But it wasn’t always like that. There ‘overnight success’ took about 10 years.

It started at the prestigious jazz studies school at the University of North Texas. One of the students, Mike League, who grew up listening to R&B and classic rock had some ideas and began writing some songs.

“I was writing stuff that sounded poppy, groovy and more worldly, especially Latin music,” he told iRock Jazz. “I basically got nine of my buddies together and we’d meet at my house once a week and play through the songs I was writing.

“Then we’d play a free gig in a basement of a pizza parlor in the town square of Denton. Then play another gig at a coffee shop. The thing about having a band with nine to 10 guys is that if everybody brings five friends, you have a full house.”

They started to build a little fan base around town and put out a record. The only logical next step was to take the show on the road. “We took a chance and booked a tour which was more of a college road trip. I probably sent out 200 to 300 emails to clubs just trying to book a two-week tour from Texas to D.C. Of those 200 emails, I probably got 15 responses – nine of them were ‘no’.

“It felt like pushing this boulder up an infinitely tall mountain. It was definitely discouraging. But when you’re 19 years old and stupid, it’s like you have limitless perseverance.

“We’d end up playing a lot of house parties because we couldn’t book enough venues. If we knew a buddy with a friend in that city that had a basement we would play in that basement. And we would sleep there.

“We had 10 people on the road. We’d bring sleeping bags in the van and we’d all just find a spot on the floor and use our backpacks as a pillow. And that’s not the first tour. It was three years of that. We were playing house parties for years.

“We would moderately breakthrough in one market like Hattiesburg, Mississippi. But the next town two hours down the road, they didn’t give a shit. So they wouldn’t take a chance on us. When the house parties got full, we’d book a venue.

“We had to prove ourselves in every town.” They would show up at radio stations and beg to play for free for the publicity and around 4 o’clock day of the show they would be passing out flyers for the show. “It was like guerilla warfare.”

A life-changing moment for a musician happened in 2014: they won a Grammy for the song Something, on the Family Dinner, Volume One (Ropeadope, 2013) album, Lelah Hathaway was singing. When you win a Grammy people (fans, promoters) take notice.

They still travel worldwide doing something like 200 shows a year. There accommodations are considerably better.

Robert 'Sput' Searight, the cerebral drummer

Robert 'Sput' Searight. (Photo by Drum!)

Robert ‘Sput’ Searight is a cerebral drummer. He is in great demand having worked with Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Snarky Puppy and his latest project with Shaun Martin on Seven Summers (Ropeadope, 2015).

But his fans who celebrate his success as a drummer would be surprised that he is equally talented as a piano player.

Searight has been turning heads since the beginning, way back since his days at the prestigious Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Arts. Geno Young, who also appears on Shaun Martin’s Seven Summers, remembered seeing Sput Searight around Booker T.

“I remember knowing Sput was a drummer, then going from my classical piano lesson into a practice room and hearing him play piano and I was like ‘what the hell? He plays like that, too?’ Geno Young said in an interview with Grown Folks Music.

Searight played piano in the Booker T jazz combo. “I went to Rutherford College for my Associate's Degree in music education, where I also played jazz piano in the big band,” Searight told the Modern Drummer. “I played drums in a second band. Then I went to North Texas State University, where the Snarky band members came from; all the raw drums that I had under my belt kind of met the technical side.”

Playing piano has informed his drumming much like it did for Antonio Sanchez, a long-time Pat Metheny collaborator, who was also a classically trained piano player. “I got a lot of information from the piano's perspective. I like Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Oscar Peterson. I don't sound like any of these guys, but they're my favorites. And Count Basie, because of how he phrased; he played from a melodic standpoint more so than chopping and fast scales. He made the songs sing like a vocalist when he played the piano. I was fascinated with his playing.

“It's meant everything for my drumming. When I play music, I'm thinking tones and melodies. I'm playing from a weird perspective for a drummer actually. I'm looking for melodies and using my ears differently, as opposed to always playing from a rhythmic standpoint. I am thinking melodies first.

“During junior college I practiced eight hours a day. It took a long time to catch up on school! I was practicing coordination, learning different styles. I wanted to practice both piano and drums, so I did four hours apiece. I played to Elvin Jones on records and transcribed his solos. I tried to transcribe Steve Gadd grooves as well as try to mimic the James Brown drummers. I'd see how long I could lock a groove and make it feel good.

“My career took off after my first year at North Texas. Now, after having a career in professional music for fifteen years, I don't have a lot of chances to practice like that anymore. I only attended North Texas for a semester and a half as a percussion major, then I began working. Snarky would come to Dallas for jam gigs. We mixed together in the Dallas community of music.”

Searight said it is important that a drummer or musician not limit himself. “In a nutshell, being aware of broadening my horizons, so that I didn't limit myself to playing one genre. I wanted to know every style, be in every situation and succeed. I wanted to be able to comply with every artist and producer. Being a professional, being on time, all these things have contributed to where I am today. I was taught by people who were very professional and encouraging and offered me good advice. I advise drummers to put themselves in the environment they want to be in. Work with musicians who will kick your ass, guys who will not just praise you but will tell you what you're doing wrong and give you the opportunity to learn. They'll be a big factor in the kind of musician you will become.”

Jason Davis: when Da Mayor plays, people listen

Music can be a magical experience. Jason Davis -- one of the tenor saxophone players featured on Shaun Martin’s Seven Summers (Ropeadope, 2015) album – understands this.

While playing his saxophone outdoors a stranger approached him and told him, he was deaf his whole life, but he heard the saxophone, the first sound he ever heard. This magical experience happened not just once, but on two separate occasions.

“Those moments made me understand how important it is to play and understand that it’s bigger than me,” Jason wrote on his website.

Jason, whose friends call him, Da Mayor, says he draws inspiration from the greats Bob Marley, Louis Armstrong, Fela Kuti and Ray Charles.

He has played with jazz great Roy Ayers, Dallas legend David “Fathead” Newman from Ray Charles band, soul blues legend Mel Waiters, and Dallas talents Roy Hargrove and Erykah Badu.

Davis’ career began innocently enough when music teacher Sylvester Wallace walked into his fourth-grade class and told the teacher he wants five of the smartest kids to join the band. Davis was one of those chosen. He picked up the clarinet and within two weeks he was playing in school programs: playing everything from Johann Sebastian Bach to Whitney Houston in school programs. He later picked up the saxophone in church.

“My inspiration comes like a church service. God gives me the music and different styles and musical elements help me to filter the sound to the audience.”

He is a bandleader at events around town and he is also a producer; his tunes are on i-Tunes under Dallas Track Factory. He is constantly writing. “All day long I record little melodies into my phone or I may write on a napkin during lunch. I have a large box full of things that I started writing and didn't complete. I use all of these things to put a song into motion. “

Jason ‘Da Mayor’ Davis has come a long way from playing in school, playing in church, to playing with the stars. His personality is as big as his music. As he likes to say, ‘Da mayor don’t bother nobody; and nobody bother Da Mayor.’  

Andre Boyd, the international drummer

Andre Boyd and wife Gwen.

Andre Boyd – a drummer for the international Cirque du Soleil – likes to think of himself as a ‘young veteran.’ He is quick to say young veteran is not a contradiction in terms.

He actually began playing drums at the age of two! He began playing for a living before he was finished high school at the age of 17 and has continued non-stop to his current age of 33. That, he says, makes him a young veteran.

Some musicians went to arts and music high schools; some even continued their studies in colleges and universities. Andre wasn’t one of them. Andre’s college was the night clubs, dance halls, wedding and banquet halls and other entertainment venues in St. Louis.

“I was playing in one or two cover bands, behind a jazz vocalist, blues, church, organ at my mom’s church (he plays organ, too), rock and roll, a little bit of everything,” he said by phone from Seoul, South Korea where he is playing a Cirque du Soleil production called Quidam.

In his days in St. Louis, he remembers finishing one show and running to another, sometimes leaving drum sets and coming back to break it down and pack it up later. Sometimes there would be wardrobe changes (like tuxedos) on the run.

He was fortunate to have an older brother Chris Boyd who would become a professional drummer. And he was fortunate to live in St. Louis which was the home of two world-renown drummers Jeremy Haynes and Rob Woodie. There was also a cadre of drummers who were his contemporaries who would go on to be nationally known drummers: Joey Oscar, Mark Colenburg, Kim Thompson, Montez Coleman, Marcus Bailor, Gregory Porter, Kevin Kelley.

“I was surrounded by great musicians. It made me push for greatness.”

He played the St. Louis circuit for about 13 years until the bottom fell out of the American economy during a time of recession. It hit particularly hard in St. Louis and even harder in the St. Louis entertainment industry. He and his wife Gwen travelled to New York on a wing and a prayer for his audition for the Cirque du Soleil job.

The Cirque du Soleil job was a blessing; it provided stability and a decent enough income. But the job for the past two years has its own unique challenges: constant travelling without his family through Canada, then through Europe, into Israel, currently in South Korea and headed throughout Asia and on to Australia and New Zealand.

Through all of this travelling, Andre sets up clinics for drummers in various countries. Even when he is back in the U.S. on break he holds clinics in his current home of the Gulf Coast area and other parts of the country.

When his current world tour wraps up, he plans to move to the west coast and be an instructor at the Musicians Institute and do some work with the Microsoft brand Notes for Life.

Andre is an industrious man in the business of drumming and entertainment. And at the same time a strong family man with a wife and two adult daughters and a younger daughter. When his family eventually gathers for that family dinner on the west coast, he can make a toast, I’ve been around the world and back!