Snarky Puppy
02 ABC
Glasgow
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Snarky Puppy love playing Glasgow and Glasgow clearly loves having them back as they continue to move up the venue scale. The band’s live appeal is obvious: its performances have the feeling of an event and its music is similarly eventful. It doesn’t stay in one place, rhythmically, stylistically or geographically, too long and it’s arranged for maximum impact, be that with a full-on full band surge or a keyboard solo that was almost literally that – solo – to begin with before building up with possibly the most bent synth notes since George Duke played at the Apollo over the way.
In some senses this is a continuation of jazz’s big band era brought into the social media interaction age – the gig was being recorded and will be available for download on the band’s website shortly – and if the line-up here was a very mobile nine-piece, it often sounded orchestral and there are features in the music that, say, Kenton or Ellington might well have embraced, not least in the evocations of the Orient, Africa, Spain and Latin America.
The groove, of course, is decidedly of the current time and the elements of hungry funk here and Philly soul there, not to mention the tear-it-up trumpet and saxophone extemporisations and drums-percussion sequences, communicate with an audience ranging from student pass to bus pass vintages.
For all the music’s sophistication and the musicians’ undoubted prowess, it’s that communication, a sense of community, co-ownership even, that impresses most in a way and as the band picked up the Eastern European-flavoured chant that formed the concert’s coda it was noticeable that the audience had got there first – in harmony.
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