When Snarky Puppy won a Grammy in January of 2014, the question I
was asked most was, Was this on your bucket list of things to do
before you die? And my answer to each of them was, actually, no.
I have only one thing on my list. The only thing I want to do
before I die is make an album with an orchestra.
It had been a topic of discussion for three months at that time.
During the October 2013 sessions for We Like It Here in
Utrecht, our good friend Friederike Darius had invited two of the
Metropole Orkest s managers to join us as guests. Within ten
minutes of the performance s end, we had already crafted a plan
to make a record together. Sometimes life is that easy. Not
always, not most of time, but every once in a while, it is.
The last thing I wanted to do with this rtunity was turn it
into a Snarky Puppy With Strings situation. While on tour in
Germany in November, I snuck off to Berlin for a night to meet
with conductor Jules Buckley and discuss possibilities for the
material. We both agreed that a brand new piece of music written
specifically for this hybrid ensemble would be the ideal
scenario. I asked Jules, could I customize the instrumentation of
the Metropole a bit? Of course I could. How about a lot more than
a bit? No problem. Is it okay if I do the arranging on my own
despite the fact that I ve never arranged for an orchestra and
then just have you clean it up and make it sound like I know what
I m doing? Perfectly fine with me. Is there anything I could ask
you right now that would elicit a negative response? No.
If there were any way to sum up the tone and attitude of the
entire experience, this conversation with Jules would just about
do it. It went like that from start to finish. I wrote the music
while on tour, in buses and on planes and in dressing rooms
backstage before and after shows. Throughout the whole process,
my governing concept was to try to capture the many sides and
personalities of the only place where I feel truly connected to
the earth as a human being. A place that is at once innocent,
frightening, awe-inspiring, impenetrable, fragile, stoic,
telling, a shelter, a labyrinth, a temple, a tomb, a sanctuary, a
parliament, a prison. The forest.
I wanted it to be a suite, a single piece of music connected by a
thread that could highlight the strengths of the Metropole-
specifically, their stylistic versatility and incredible sense of
groove and feel (a rarity in the orchestral world). Each movement
is about a different forest I ve spent time in, from the
ains of Portugal to the swamps of Louisiana to the giant
redwoods of northern California to the land behind my neighbor s
house in Virginia to the dark wood that lived all of our heads as
children, the one that we dreamt of being lost in, consumed by,
and then woke up sweating, running to our parents room for
reassurance.
My desire was to make everything about the album different from
what we ve ever done and also from what is expected of an
orchestral album. It was recorded 100% live, with no overdubs or
studio magic to make things sound cleaner or thicker. 300
audience members joined us for four performances over two nights,
wearing headphones in order to hear the music exactly as we, the
performers, were hearing it. We stacked the low end of the
orchestra with bass and contrabass clarinets and low brass and
expanded the string section. We arranged set pieces and the
physical bodies of the musicians to form a kind of integrated
human-floral forest within which the audience would sit (I m
still jealous of the people whose seats were inside of the string
section). We tried to create a place where one could forget where
they were and simply be surrounded by sound.
-Michael League