Michael League: Spain, Sake, & Following His Muse Down the Rabbit Hole

Best known for leading Snarky Puppy, the not-quite-jazz mini-big band he founded as a college student in Texas more than 20 years ago, bassist Michael League is today a cottage industry, a brand. He has his own record label (GroundUP Music), his own annual festival (the GroundUp Music Festival) and seems intent on setting a world record for musical collaborations. He’s like the mad commander of an expanding global scene where jazz, rock, funk, pop and world music swirl around and through one another.

League finds inspiration, he has said, in the “middle zone” where music is profound and challenging, but appeals to the ears and the body. Trained as a jazz musician, he spent years touring with David Crosby and dreams of playing with Stevie Wonder, Björk, and James Taylor. He tells students to get as many experiences as they can. Because music is additive; it grows inside you as you grow as a person. It’s an expanding language. It’s communal.

The musicians he plays with are his family, he says, and over the next month he will collaborate with a long list of family members in San Francisco (where he is a 2026 SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director) and New York (where the Blue Note club is hosting League for much of January). Just to get a sense of the range of his collaborations, look at the list of drummers who will play in his shows in those two cities: Pedrito Martínez, Antonio Sánchez, Nathaniel Townsley, Kendrick Scott, Nate Smith, Mark Guiliana, and Nate Wood. These are some of the top percussionists in contemporary music; they move in and out of League’s rotating cast of dreamed-up ensembles.

The people in his bands tend to have “a set of characteristics that I greatly value in a musician,” he explains. “They have to be an enjoyable person to be around. They have to be positive. They have to be curious. They have to be interested in new stuff and new ideas and not just want to do what they always do. They have to be communicative — great listeners, happy to play the least amount possible to make the music sound good.”

A curious and upbeat musician himself, League was born in California. He grew up in a military family that moved from place to place: to Alabama, to Virginia. He messed around with a drum pad as a kid, took up the violin in fourth grade, switched to guitar in middle school and landed on the bass at age 17. In high school, he played in rock and pop bands and was always a “song person.” His brother, a heavy metal drummer who was also into jazz, introduced League to “jazz gateway” albums by Steely Dan and Frank Zappa. When League began listening to jazz, his favorite musicians were no-fuss swingers: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass. (They’re still his favorites.)

This was my second interview with League.

When I first spoke to him in 2020, he recalled trying to establish himself in the jazz studies program at the University of North Texas. He claimed to have been so lacking in musical skills that he couldn’t get into any of the school’s ensembles — and decided to found his own band. Because his tunes were not very jazz-like — a quirky hybrid of influences, like a musical “mutt” — he called it Snarky Puppy. The group’s first gig was in a pizza joint. “We released our second live gig as an `album,’” he said. “I printed the labels on Memorex CD-Rs in my dorm room.” A “D.I.Y. juggernaut,” as The New York Times once described the band, Snarky Puppy put out its first official album, The Only Constant, in 2006, and established itself through endless touring, often in a crummy van. League’s entrepreneurial skills were key: Concerts and recording sessions were filmed for release on DVD and YouTube, and the group’s fusion of jazz, funk, rock and hip-hop caught on with a worldwide audience.

A prolific musician, and a workhorse, League routinely dives into new interests. It may be the music of Mali or Senegal. His band Bokanté is another hybrid, bringing together blues and traditional African and Afro-Caribbean influences. A few years ago, League decided it was time to master the oud (Middle Eastern lute) and a Persian frame drum known as the daf. Why not? He sought out and studied with master musicians in Istanbul and elsewhere and has now brought those instruments into his repertoire. He plays them on his duo recordings with Snarky Puppy pianist Bill Laurance.

Five years ago, League moved to a small village in Catalonia, Spain, where he has a studio. It’s where he recorded and co-produced Youssou N'Dour's Éclairer le monde – Light the World, which has been nominated for Best Global Music album at the upcoming 2026 GRAMMY Awards. The village is also where League, a big food and wine guy, grows grapes and produces what he describes as a “village wine, nothing special” with local friends who are sommeliers. With one of them, in partnership with a brewery in Fukushima, Japan, he has initiated yet another project: The marketing of a new brand of sake, named Zasshu, a blend of six different sakes. “We named it Zasshu because it’s kind of a mixed breed sake; it’s a bit of a mutt, which also fits with the Snarky Puppy thing.” (League is seeking U.S. distribution.)

Two weeks ago, I spoke to League who was at his home in Spain, putting finishing touches on plans for his New York and San Francisco residencies. His week at SFJAZZ begins Jan. 28 with a Listening Party, hosted by SFJAZZ CEO Gabrielle Armand. (Free to SFJAZZ Members.) On Jan. 29, League performs with the band Elipsis, featuring Antonio Sánchez, Pedrito Martínez, and vocalist Glenda del E. On Jan. 30, he plays duo with an old friend, Snarky Puppy keyboardist Bill Laurance (also streamed on Fridays Live). On Jan. 31, he teams up with singer-songwriter Becca Stevens and The Secret Trio, a group of virtuosos with Middle Eastern and Balkan roots, and he closes his residency on Feb. 1 with a trio including former Snarky Puppy keyboardist Cory Henry and drummer Nathaniel Townsley.

League keeps stretching; life is a learning curve.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: I’ve been going over your upcoming shows at SFJAZZ in San Francisco, and also in New York at the Blue Note. Almost every show is different; it’s like a kaleidoscopic set of musical collaborations. As a kid, before you got into music, were you always creating projects and putting people together in different combinations?

A: I think so. I always loved team sports, which is ironic because now I’m obsessed with tennis. But as a kid I was only into playing team sports. And my dad was in the military, so growing up in those environments, you have a bit of a hive mind mentality. It’s about the team, the group. And I always liked projects. Like I’d draw up imaginary football leagues with imaginary football teams.

Q: How old were you?

A: I was six or seven years old, and we were living in Alabama. I had a computer game on my dad’s computer called Joe Montana Football and it allowed you to change all the names and all the numbers. And I was totally into college football, so I changed all 28 NFL teams to 28 college teams and then I went through all these almanacs from 1993 and changed all the names and numbers for all the players and teams. I was a little obsessive from a young age.

Q: I’ve read interviews in which you said that your parents stressed a strong work ethic — that “laziness was not tolerated.”

A: Yeah, if I got a B+, my parents never said, “Good job!” My dad’s family had been military for multiple generations, so that culture is very demanding. It’s not to say they were overly hard on me. But definitely there wasn’t a lot of “Great job! Couldn’t have been better!” It was always, “Well, you got an A, but you still got all these answers wrong.”

Q: Do you consider yourself a jazz musician?

A: Yeah, I feel like I’m a jazz musician, among other things, but I don’t play much jazz. I don’t consider what I’m doing jazz. But I’ve spent years and many thousands of hours playing jazz music. And I don’t know — that question is complex. Because what is jazz? Most of my favorite jazz artists hated that word. Jazz is a word that was inflicted on Black American music by white people. But what we consider the jazz tradition — Ellington, Mingus, Wayne Shorter — that is music that I studied for many years and still inspires and still nests inside everything I do. It’s my base language, but it’s not often that I’m playing a straight-ahead jazz gig.

Q: You’re connected to so many musicians; at this point, it’s a global community that keeps expanding. Do you think of it as a giant family?

A: Yeah, for sure. Like I mentioned, I’ve always been into teams and putting teams together and the community thing was always a huge part of my musical experience. After being in jazz school and feeling that I didn’t really fit in there, I moved to Dallas and became part of the Black American music scene there. I played in Black churches and felt much more in tune with the mind-set of that community than the one I’d started in. And then I moved to New York and found more likeminded people — it was like the community kept growing exponentially.

Q: Do you have a philosophy that underpins your collaborations? What do you look for in a musician? What excites you and makes you want to play with someone?

A: I think combinations of people are interesting to me. Any musician that’s talented can shine more or less depending on the environment that they’re in. You can make a band sound really bad by picking great musicians whose concepts don’t merge. And vice versa, you can put together a bunch of people who aren’t such great musicians, but they’ve got chemistry, and they sound great when they play together. History is full of examples of that kind of thing.

Q: Do you look for musicians who have interests outside music? People whose extra-musical interests match your own? People you can talk to?

A: When you’re on tour, for sure. Because you’re only playing music a couple hours a day. So I was just on tour with (drummer) Nate Smith and (keyboardist) James Francies. And James is really into food and wine – that’s our connecting point. And I was touring with Snarky Puppy, and (keyboardist) Justin Stanton is obsessed with tennis. So we were playing tennis every day.

Q: Let’s talk about your upcoming week at SFJAZZ. Your residency starts with the band Elipsis — your collaboration with Pedrito Martínez and Antonio Sánchez, a pair of great drummer-percussionists (Jan. 29). How did you meet them? How did you become a team?

A: I met Antonio and Pedro in New York City when we were all living there and we formed Elipsis — I think around 2016 or ‘17, or maybe it was even 2018. It was definitely before COVID. But we only did one gig. We did rehearsals in my studio, but just that one gig, which was at the North Sea Jazz Festival when I had a residency there (in 2018).

But then we decided to make a record together and we came up with this very interesting workflow where the two of them went into the studio in New York — and I was watching on Zoom, because I was in Spain. And we picked tempos and keys and time signatures and the two of them improvised for like 10 or 15 minutes at a time over each set of requirements. We’d pick a key and Pedro would sing a Yoruba refrain and sing it — overdub it — over their percussion improvisations. And everything was a click track, so I could move things around later. And then they sent me all the files and I basically Frankensteined everything together: chopped things, moved things around, wrote harmonies, and kind of composed everything after the recording session. It was the total opposite of what you usually do. It was an inverted process.

Q: How do you recreate that in a live performance?

A: We’ve done some tours since then, so now we’re playing the songs live that we created in the studio. If you listen to the new record, it sounds like the songs were composed.

Q: What do you admire about Pedrito Martínez?

A: Pedro for me is a continuum. He’s so deeply rooted in the history and tradition of Yoruba music and Cuban and Afro-Cuban music. But he’s also very in touch with the present and he’s looking to the future. He’s adventurous and innovative, but the roots go so deep. It’s rare.

Q: What about Antonio Sánchez?

A: Antonio is just a complete master of his craft, playing in so many styles of music, so sensitive, so creative, like a storyteller on the drums — and now one of my best friends. We live near each other. I saw him last night at a party.

Q: You’ve brought one more musician into the group, and she’ll be with you in San Francisco.

A: Yes, Glenda del E — we wanted a fourth musician, and Glenda brings her Cuban roots to the music. And she was in Alejandro Sanz’s band for over a decade. (Sanz is a Spanish singer and composer.) She sings back-up. She knows how to make things sound like songs.

Q: On the second night of your residency (Jan. 30), you’ll play in a duo with Bill Laurance, the keyboardist from Snarky Puppy (also streamed on Fridays Live). You’ve said in other interviews that you have different musical itches that you like to scratch. When I listen to your two albums with Bill — which sound nothing like Snarky Puppy — it seems like you’re both scratching some new itches.

A: Definitely. I think we both look at it as an opportunity to explore sides of our musicality that maybe there isn’t space for in groups like Snarky Puppy or in Bill’s trio. I think that it’s the quietest group we’ve ever played in, and the most spacious. On every gig, the goal is to play quieter and leave more space. It’s really, really therapeutic; it’s wonderful. We really enjoy the peacefulness of this project, and also the freedom. Because with just two people, you can go anywhere. We try to surprise each other every night. I think it’s a really emotional and evocative thing for us.

Q: In addition to bass and some other instruments, you play the oud on your albums with Bill. Also, at some point over the past few years, you started playing Persian percussion. What is the backstory to all this?

A: My mom’s side of our family is Greek and my brother is a Greek musician, and there was an oud in the house and I’d mess around with it. But I didn’t take it seriously until a trip to Turkey in 2016 or 2018. I had a polyp in my throat after doing a tour with David Crosby and went to Turkey for two months on a voice rest routine and only spoke for five minutes a day. And I’d wanted to study Persian percussion with Tarik Aslan, an incredible percussionist who was living in Istanbul.

Q: You wanted to study a particular percussion instrument with him?

A: Yes, it’s called a daf, a frame drum. You see it in Iran, mostly, but also in Syria and Turkey. He’s one of the most respected daf players in the world,

Q: So did you wind up studying with Tarik Aslan?

A: I did. I studied with him every day for two months and I still take lessons with him when I’m there. But halfway through that trip I also decided to get an oud, because I was in Istanbul, and what better place? I took an oud lesson or two and started messing around with it and studying it and I was taken under the wing of Ara Dinkjian of The Secret Trio. He’s one of the greatest oud players in the world and he’s become my teacher, if not my mentor, and so it’s really great to be playing the next night with him and Becca at SFJAZZ.

Q: These connections are amazing. We’ve now jumped to the third night of your residency (Jan. 31), when you’ll play with Becca Stevens and The Secret Trio. Who did you know first, Becca or the trio?

A: I’ve known Becca for 17 years; I knew her first. We met through the GroundUP Music Festival that’s about to have its tenth edition in Miami. But I think at the festival’s fourth edition, Becca was playing with her band, and The Secret Trio was playing a late-night set. And I told Becca she absolutely had to go see them, and she was like, “But that’s at 2 a.m.” But we went, the two of us, and she became instantly obsessed with them. And I took her backstage to meet them and suggested that they make a record and everybody said, “Yeah.”

Q: Tell me more about The Secret Trio.

A: This is a very unconventional instrumentation for backing a guitar player like Becca: oud, clarinet, and kanun, which is like a dulcimer that’s plucked with your fingers, not with hammers. Becca and the trio wound up doing some gigs on their own, and Becca and I wrote some music and did some arrangements of Secret Trio tunes for her record with them. To hear the trio with Becca; it’s one of the most beautiful bands I can think of.

Q: The way you go down rabbit holes with different musicians around the world and turn your connections into actual bands is pretty interesting, Michael. It’s not typical.

A: Thank you. I’m glad somebody cares!

Q: Let’s talk about the residency’s final night (Feb. 1) when you’ll have a trio with Nathaniel Townsley and Cory Henry. You and Cory go way back; he was in Snarky Puppy. But how did you cross paths with Nathaniel? And how did the three of you become a band?

A: I met Nathaniel Townsley in a bowling alley; I think it was in Queens. Cory invited me to go bowling one night and Nat was there. He’s an amazing bowler, by the way. And I realized halfway through: “Oh, my God, that’s Nat Townsley.” I remembered watching him on a Modern Drummer VHS when I was in high school. And so we became friends. And I got this endorsement from Markbass (the amplifier manufacturer) and was asked to make a video. So I decided to do it with Nathaniel and Cory and we went into the studio and recorded “Creepin’” by Stevie Wonder and “Continuum” by Jaco Pastorius.

And those videos wound up getting a lot of attention, so we played one gig at a little club in Brooklyn. And I’ve played with Cory a million times since and with Nat a lot of times — but never the three of us at the same time. So this will be like a reunion of the little band that only played one gig. Nat has one of the deepest pockets of any drummer I’ve ever played with and he leaves so much space, and I play with a lot of space as a bassist, and it leaves a lot of room for Cory to pull the puppet strings of the music.

Q: Tell me about the Spanish village you live in.

A: I live in Catalonia. I bought the house here in 2018 and I moved in 2020. There are about 500 people in this village. I first visited it in 2013 when I was composing the album Sylva for Snarky Puppy and the Metropole Orkest. The manager of Metropol has a home here and she gave me the keys and told me to go write the tunes.

Q: Do you know everyone in the village?

A: Yeah, I know pretty much everybody.

Q: You’re pretty busy with touring and producing and whatnot. How much time do you spend there?

A: This year I was probably home for four months, maybe three months. I’m here now for 10 days, which is great. It’s normally no more than five days. I’ve been trying to bring more of my projects here. I have a studio and I just produced a record with Youssou N’Dour. There were all these amazing Senegalese musicians going in and out. It was great.

Q: I’ve heard that before moving to Spain and buying your house, you were living in somebody’s basement in New York. Were you in Manhattan? Brooklyn?

A: It’s true. It was in Brooklyn. I lived in the basement of someone’s house in Park Slope: no windows, no Wi-Fi.

Q: Did you have a studio in the basement? Wait, I guess not; you didn’t have Wi-Fi.

A: I had a studio in Gowanus (another Brooklyn neighborhood), but I didn’t work out of my house. It was like a studio apartment in the basement. No natural light. It was pretty wild.

Q: Living in Spain, you’re kind of an ex-pat. What are your feelings about what’s going on in the United States — specifically the devaluation of the arts scene?

A: It’s definitely weird looking at the United States from the outside. It just feels so obvious, what’s going on there. But then you talk to people in the U.S. and they don’t have the same perspective. I feel really disappointed and kind of betrayed, based on the way we were all raised. I feel that no matter what side of the political spectrum your family was on when I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was a shared set of values. I feel that democracy definitely was a thing that was celebrated. Diversity was celebrated. I went to a school on a military base — not exactly a bastion of leftist perspectives — and I remember seeing a statement on the wall: “Diversity is our strength.” Humility was an exalted virtue. Integrity and honesty were valued. And it’s amazing to see how much we’ve gone in reverse from all that. It’s amazing to see how our leadership is sending the opposite message: They’re saying that integrity is no longer important, that the truth is what you want it to be, and that diversity is making us worse. I really feel like it’s not my country anymore. I kind of think of the United States as “them” now. Not “us.” Do you know what I mean? It still is “us.” I’m still a citizen and I still actively participate in the political process, and David Crosby strongly impressed upon me that we as artists must stand up for people who don’t have a voice. But it feels like a strange foreign land to me now as opposed to the place that I identify with as my home.

Q: You feel like this when you’re touring in the U.S.?

A: Yeah, it feels weird. The first time I noticed was when I first went back after COVID.

Q: What did you notice?

A: People are so angry. Everyone’s angry. Every single thing that anybody does is like a political symbol. If you see someone wearing a mask, they’re a liberal. If they’ve got a flag, they’re right-wing. The U.S feels like a football game right now, and nobody wants a tie.

And my community in the United States is very diverse and you feel the level of anxiety and stress that’s coming down on people. It’s a lot for people to carry on their shoulders every day when they’re called enemies of the state.

Q: You’re talking about the broad political situation. More specifically, what do you see happening to the arts in the United States? I’m talking about funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, to museums, to non-profit arts groups, and so on.

A: It’s just so frustrating to know that everywhere you go in the world — like almost every single country on Earth — you go into a restaurant or a hotel lobby and you hear American music being played, and it’s usually Black American music. American culture is so artistically rich and appreciated by every country in the world, except the U.S. The amount of musical talent in the U.S. — or just in New York City — is so immense. It’s like everything is built on a gold mine (of arts and culture) and we’re just hurling bricks of gold into the sea and letting them sink to the bottom of the ocean. What we have in the United States is in spite of the government. It’s a shame. It’s a crying shame. It’s a travesty. You can talk to any musician who tours, and they’ll tell you where they get the best treatment. It’s anywhere except the United States. And forget grants, forget commissions.

Art implies liberty and independent thought, and I think the powers that we have right now are not interested.

Q: Who are some young up-and-coming musicians you’re listening to?

A: There’s this great artist named Mk.Gee, and there’s a great singer-songwriter in New York that I was just made aware of named June McDoom. Some people who are more my age — not exactly up-and-comers — are Genevieve Artadi and Louis Cole, I feel like, as far as the sound goes, it’s so fresh. We have some wonderful artists on our GroundUP label, like Fuensanta, a Mexican singer and double-bass player. She lives in Amsterdam but comes from Mexico.

Q: I hear you’re starting a Snarky Puppy summer camp for young musicians.

A: It’s called Rabbit Hole. We’re doing it for the first time (in summer 2026); it’ll be in Tarrytown, New York. We have Pino Palladino and all these huge names that are coming, like Charlie Hunter and Becca Stevens.

Q: It sounds great — but why are you doing it? Don’t you have enough going on without starting a summer camp?

A: I just feel that there’s so much on the internet – so many instructional videos and people talking about scales and what notes to play over chords. But there’s not so many places where you can go to get a philosophy that underlies the music and gives it meaning, and where you can go and talk to some of the greatest musicians in the world. So that’s what we’re doing. It’s another project.

Michael League's week as SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director runs 1/28-2/1. Tickets and more information are available here.

A staff writer at SFJAZZ, Richard Scheinin is a lifelong journalist. He was the San Jose Mercury News' classical music and jazz critic for more than a decade and has profiled scores of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa and the Dalai Lama.