Michael League, visiting professor at the Fundación Conservatori Liceu, has been featured in the international magazine DownBeat by the hand of Ted Panken, a prominent jazz journalist and critic who has made important publications and reports in the field of jazz and modern music. The article highlights the career of the prestigious musician, leader of the band Snarky Puppy, indisputably internationally acclaimed for being one of the bands that has revolutionized the global panorama of modern music.
The article highlights the experience of Michael League, one of the most relevant musicians on the international scene in the field of modern music, as a teacher and director of the Liceu BLAM Collective, one of the four Big Ensembles of Jazz and Modern Music of the Conservatori Liceu —together with the Liceu Jazz Grup, the Liceu Big Band, or the Liceu Gran Ensemble—, which explores the sonorities of the Black American Music (BAM) through the performance of the repertoire of black American musicians after 1950. League expresses in the article that it sought to promote research through interpretation in its classes at the Conservatori Liceu, especially in a geographically away from the origins of black African-American music.
League has had a special relationship with the Conservatori Liceu since he began collaborating as a teacher and director of the Liceu BLAM Collective. League has helped develop the area of modern music and has brought his great experience to the Conservatori Liceu’s pedagogical project, in an unprecedented collaboration with an internationally renowned artist such as Michael League. The students have been able to learn from their knowledge and establish contact with them, in an eminently practical experience within the framework of the Liceu BLAM Collective, and which is also the fundamental basis of the other Big Ensembles of the Jazz and Modern Music Department.
Michael League studied jazz at the North Texas University, a center with which the Fundación Conservatori Liceu has a fruitful collaboration agreement. He later moved to nearby Dallas and there he worked with some of the most influential figures in modern gospel, R&B and soul music. He was mentored by legendary musicians such as keyboardist Bernard Wright (Milas Davis, Chaka Khan) before moving to Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. As an instrumentalist and producer, he has worked with a wide range of artists: David Crosby, Laura Mvula, Lalah Hathaway, Joe Walsh, Kirk Franklin, Walter Hawkins, Marvin Sapp, Israel Houghton, Terence Blanchard, Esperanza Spalding, Joshua Redman, Wayne Krantz, Chris Potter, Salif Keita, Eliades Ochoa (Buena Vista Social Club), Sus Baca, Carlos Malta, Väsen, playing almost all styles of modern music, blues, rock, pop, jazz, gospel or world music, among others.
You can check the complete news in this link:
Michael League’s Spanish Adventure (DownBeat, Ted Panken, 21/06/2022)