Snarky Puppy at Vicar Street Dublin review

Image: Snarky Puppy 

A restless energy is building inside Dublin’s Vicar Street. The heat of the place rises as more and more people join the mob that stands before the stage, waiting with increased impatience for Snarky Puppy to grace them with their presence. The crowd are shuffling their feet, swaying from side to side; doing anything at all but standing still. There’s a sense that something extraordinary is coming.

As nine o’clock arrives, the tension rises some more. There’s movement at the side of the stage, and the crowd has picked up on it. The cheering starts and slowly starts to build. The lights go down and the crowd starts to lose its collective mind as Snarky Puppy, led by bassist and composer Michael League, walk on stage with big, jubilant smiles on their faces.

They allow themselves to be engulfed by the noise for a moment before League opens proceedings with a few notes from his bass. The rest of the group fall in and what follows is a performance so good, so energetic, that at times the sensation you feel can only be likened to confusion. The whole affair is a sensory overload that leaves the body and mind bewildered as to what it should be feeling. 

The first and most striking thing to note about the group’s performance is that it is extremely danceable. With all the intricacies of a jazz outfit, one would be forgiven for expecting a disjointed crowd, moving awkwardly out of time in a hopeless attempt to keep up with the band. Thankfully, this was not so.

One of the group’s primary functions is to bring jazz to a wider audience (check out popular hit 'Lingus' above), and the best way to do that, it seems, is to make it easy for a crowd to groove along to. Playing tracks new and old, the band knew which buttons to press and when to press them, getting everyone present in the packed venue shuffling and clapping along gleefully.

At one stage in fact, Michael League proved his ambitious nature by splitting the crowd into different sections and getting each section to clap a different rhythm. The effect was impressive, to see say the least, and it served as a most splendid intro to one of the songs on the setlist.

Once the sense of occasion had been come to terms with, it was possible to try to appreciate the sheer intricacies of what the musicians were actually playing. Each member of the band had their moment onstage, with absolutely nobody letting the side down. There was a real sense of respect between the crowd and the band, something that can only be achieved in watching some truly brilliant musicians doing something unlike anything else out there. 

Every solo performed was met with the utmost attention. If someone dared to cheer out of line they would be met by a horde of "shushes", lest anyone miss a single note or drum beat. Even the band members themselves would take a moment to relax during solos, taking in whatever it was that their colleague happened to playing at that time. 

At one point or another, each member of the band got to strut their stuff and show the depths of their talent with their chosen instrument. One of the biggest crowd responses of the night occurred after a long, playful percussion solo in which the drummer and percussionist played directly to each other and to the crowd. Towards the end of the gig, keyboardist Cory Henry, who himself will be soon on tour blew the roof off the venue with a combination of his insane soloing at the end of track 'Lingus' and his peculiar - yet endearing - facial expressions throughout. 

After closing with 'Lingus' (above), the band went offstage for less than a minute before the all encompassing sound of applause demanded them back on for the encore. They fell into 'Shofukan' with the crowd singing the song’s memorable hook back to them with astounding energy.

The gig ended with a wall of noise as the crowd attempted to give back some of the vibes that the band had given it. The sound of people singing 'Shofukan' spilled out into the alleyway beside the venue as the people present attempted to formulate a sentence or thought to sum up the experience. The mood was that of exasperation, with nobody capable of communicating the joys or sensations of the spectacle they had just been a part of. The only thing that anyone could be sure of was that they had just witnessed something extraordinary.  

Snarky Puppy continue their tour in Leeds tonight (1st October) tickets and info here.