By Michael League’s reckoning, his band Snarky Puppy have played in 55 countries; quite a tally for any group, never mind a 19-piece outfit. But Snarky Puppy are not like other ensembles. For a start, these able instrumentalists have probably absorbed musical influences from most of those countries. Their line-up comprises multiple guitarists, keyboard players, drummers, percussionists and brass players orbiting around bassist bandleader League. To paraphrase the late Fall frontman Mark E Smith, if it’s League and your granny on bongos, it’s Snarky Puppy. And League probably would make the best of that stripped-back line-up.

‘We know that we can accept any gig at any time as long as I’m available,’ he says, ‘and then if anybody in the band can’t make it, we have two or three more members we can ask. It doesn’t really matter because everybody knows all the music, so we can switch on the fly and there’s no issue. Because everybody takes care of business, this makes the entire organisation a little more agile. For the amount of people, it’s surprisingly light on its feet. I’ve been in trios that were more high maintenance than Snarky Puppy.’

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League originally formed Snarky Puppy in 2003 with some of his fellow jazz students at the University Of North Texas because, he says, he wasn’t good enough to make it into any of the official ensembles. This teenage rock guitarist cut his teeth in high-school cover bands but moved to bass and was switched on to jazz when he heard Steely Dan, still a key influence on the group.

His upstart puppy grew arms and legs as it ventured out into the rich, diverse music community of Dallas, broadening a sonic style to encompass funk, rock and world music influences and eventually adding band members from Argentina, Japan and the UK, as well as including Glaswegian sound engineer Michael Harrison among the wider family. League moved to Brooklyn in the late 2000s, and now lives in Spain, close to the French border (when we speak, he has just hopped over to Toulouse to produce Cuban pianist Harold López-Nussa). But despite being an international operation these days, Snarky Puppy remains rooted in Dallas, paying tribute to their home town on new album Empire Central.

‘Dallas is the place where Snarky Puppy went from being an average college band to a band that knows what it is and plays with heart and soul and conviction,’ says League. ‘That’s something that we didn’t learn in college; that’s something that most of us in the band learned from being in Dallas and experiencing the music scene there and playing with our many friends and heroes from that scene. Texas in general has created a disproportionately large amount of influential and renowned musicians compared to the majority of American states so we just wanted to shine a little light on its cultural legacy and say thanks for all that it’s given us over the years.’

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The album features 16 new tracks, composed by various members of the group, then spiced up by their bandmates and recorded in Snarky Puppy’s signature fashion: live and grooving in a bespoke venue in front of an audience who are kitted out with headphones so they experience the session in the same way as the musicians.

This unusual set-up has served Snarky Puppy well, to the tune of four Grammy Awards with their most recent gong arriving for Live At The Royal Albert Hall, a release from 2020. Empire Central, however, was recorded in the more intimate environs of the Deep Ellum Art Company in Dallas. ‘It was nice to return to this format after six years of not doing it because the band has grown as a collective and individually,’ says League. ‘I thought it would be a really wonderful combination of the familiar with the new and surprising.’

For League, the album has acquired a greater emotional weight since the passing of keyboard player Bernard Wright, a Dallas funk heavyweight who died in a car crash earlier this year. Empire Central features his last professionally recorded performance but his passion for mentoring younger musicians endures in Snarky Puppy’s GroundUP Music Foundation. As League insists, ‘he was the spirit of the recording.’

Snarky Puppy play O2 Academy Glasgow, Tuesday 4 October.