When people talk about Michael League, they often focus on the scale of his career: five Grammy Awards, founder and bandleader of Snarky Puppy, creator of multiple ensembles, a producer, label founder, and festival director. But what defines League most clearly isn’t any single project, it’s his role as a connector. Michael is one of those rare musicians whose greatest instrument might not be bass, or guitar, or oud, but rather his gift of assembly.
We spoke about it a few years ago for the Third Story Podcast. “I’m an organizer,” League told me. “I like looking at things and saying, those things would go together in this context. Let’s put it together.”
That instinct to assemble people as carefully as he assembles music is at the center of his three-week residency this month at Blue Note Jazz Club in New York. Rather than presenting a single band, League is rotating through ten different groups, many of them created specifically for these nights. Some feature longtime collaborators. Others bring together musicians who’ve never shared a stage. In several cases, League has written new music just for the residency.
This kind of modular thinking goes back to college for Michael. “I was always writing music,” he told me. “From the very beginning, from the first week, I was putting groups together to play tunes.”
That habit of writing, assembling, testing, followed him from the University of North Texas through Texas gospel churches, onto global stages, and eventually to Catalonia, Spain, where he now lives. Throughout it all he’s let his curiosity lead the way. “I just think of myself as a student,” he said. “I just love learning about music and studying it. When we take elements from different genres and put them into what I’m producing, it’s not put in there lightly. I listen to that stuff and I get in there and I study it the best I can with the time I have.”
Despite his role at the center of so many projects, League consistently resists the idea of authorship as ownership. “Music doesn’t belong to you,” he said. “Music is floating around in the air, and you just choose what you want to pull down and use.”
That philosophy helps explain why his projects—from Snarky Puppy to his countless collaborations feel like their own ecosystems. And League is very clear about where his confidence actually lies. “I’m very good at choosing great people to be around,” he said.
Once those people are in the room, he sometimes to step back. “Most of the time when I’m on stage,” he said, “the best thing I can do is not play.”
That’s the throughline of this Blue Note residency - not a showcase of control, but an ongoing experiment in collaboration and community. A reminder that music doesn’t move forward because of one voice, but because the right voices are brought together at the right time.
