LOS ANGELES, CA- There’s something poetic about pairing Hiatus Kaiyote and Snarky Puppy on the same bill. The names alone hint at mischief: coyotes prowl the edges of civilization, sly and unpredictable, while puppies tumble through life with unguarded joy and devotion. But the connection goes beyond wordplay. Both bands occupy a shared wilderness in modern music: territory that’s genreless, spiritual, experimental, and deeply human. Under the vast curve of the Hollywood Bowl, that wildness finally had room to breathe.
It felt right that this event of two musical species would happen outdoors. The Hollywood Bowl, with its open sky and natural acoustics, is less a venue than an ecosystem. Every note bounces off the hillside and returns transformed, each reverberation carrying the scent of night air. That expansiveness is exactly what both Hiatus Kaiyote and Snarky Puppy demand. Their music doesn’t just travel forward… it radiates outward, taking up space and then folding back into itself like breath.
The night began with Georgia Anne Muldrow, a fitting choice to open this musical convergence. She’s a pillar of Los Angeles’s underground. A singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who has spent decades building her own creative orbit. Alone on stage with her keyboard, she summoned a pulse that felt ancestral and interstellar at once.
Her music defies linear time; one moment she’s channeling jazz’s improvisational spirit, the next she’s dropping rhythmic phrasing that echoes hip-hop’s raw truth. She didn’t need volume or spectacle. Her performance felt like an invocation, preparing the ground for what was to come. Watching her, I thought about how both headliners owe a quiet debt to the scene she helped shape. It’s a scene that embodies the culture of fearless experimentation that defines this city’s musical soul.
Follow Georgia Anne Muldrow on Facebook, X and Instagram.
When Snarky Puppy took the stage, the Bowl transformed. Their music moves like a living organism: horns locking into grooves, keyboards cascading into counter-rhythms, percussion and bass anchoring it all in constant motion. I first saw them at the Troubadour years ago, when they were still relatively a well-kept secret. That show blew my mind: a dozen musicians pushing sound to the brink of chaos but never losing control. Seeing them again under the open night sky, it struck me how that same feral precision had scaled up. They still play like a family, listening intently to each other, communicating through nods and bursts of melody.
The Bowl amplified their spirit. The venue’s acoustic amphitheatre caught every syncopated snare and horn blast, letting the sound roll across the amphitheater in waves. Snarky Puppy’s music has always been about community… the joy of many voices moving as one… and here that joy multiplied. Their set drew heavily from Empire Central, their 2022 love letter to Texas, and you could feel that homegrown soul in every passage. They sounded bigger but never bloated, intricate but never sterile, alive in a way that could only happen when the music is allowed to sprawl across open air.
Before they finished their set, they announced that they were in the process of writing and recording new material. No doubt, it will be another chapter of their ever evolving sonic adventure.
Then came Hiatus Kaiyote, slipping into the stage lights like the arrival of dusk itself. They opened with “And We Go Gentle,” easing into the dreamlike shimmer of “Love Heart Cheat Code” and the lush sensuality of “Get Sun.” The setlist that followed read like a journey through their cosmos—“Rainbow Rhodes,” “Jekyll,” “Dreamboat,” “Rose Water,” “Sip Into Something Soft,” “Make Friends,” “Red Room,” “Only Time All the Time / Making Friends With Studio Owl,” “Dimitri,” and finally, “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk.” Nai Palm’s voice curled and uncurled through the air—sometimes whispering, sometimes erupting, always unpredictable. Her delivery was equal parts prayer and spell, soft around the edges yet edged with danger.
I first saw Hiatus Kaiyote in a Venice speakeasy, back when their name was a rumor passed between musicians. The crowd was tiny, the sound system was fragile, but the energy was volcanic. That night, I knew they were onto something. Their music felt alive in the same way jazz used to feel when it first broke its own rules: elastic, unrepeatable, and beautifully strange. At the Hollywood Bowl, that same electricity was intact, only expanded to cinematic proportions. Each song bloomed differently in the open air. “Red Room” became a slow exhale of warmth, “Jekyll” turned sharp and kinetic, “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” erupted like a wildfire. The Bowl’s natural acoustics cradled them perfectly; every harmonic twist had space to unfurl, every rhythmic left turn had air to land.
Some bands are meant for clubs, where sound ricochets off brick walls and sweat drips from ceilings. Hiatus Kaiyote and Snarky Puppy need sky. They thrive on the interplay between control and abandon, and that tension needs oxygen. The Bowl gave them that in abundance. The air carried Nai Palm’s voice like smoke, while Snarky Puppy’s brass and bass reverberated through the canyon like heartbeat and thunder. It was the kind of night where the environment felt complicit in the performance—nature itself becoming part of the mix.
As the evening unfolded, I kept circling back to the canine metaphor. The coyote hunts alone, sly and spiritual; the puppy thrives in the pack, playful and loyal. Hiatus Kaiyote and Snarky Puppy embody those instincts. One explores interior landscapes, chasing moonlight and emotion through tangled harmonies. The other celebrates the collective, building ecstatic architecture out of rhythm and communication. And yet, they’re both reaching for the same thing: transcendence through sound, freedom through collaboration, unity through risk.
Standing there, I remembered those smaller rooms… the Venice speakeasy, the Troubadour…and realized how far the music had traveled. What began as a whisper in the underground had grown into a symphony beneath the stars. The wildness was still there; it just had better lighting now. Watching both bands at the Bowl felt like seeing the evolution of modern musicianship: daring yet disciplined, communal yet deeply personal. They don’t play songs so much as sculpt them, letting each performance mutate and breathe until it feels alive.
As the final notes faded and the crowd rose to its feet, the metaphor completed itself. The coyote and the puppy had found common ground….not by taming their natures… but by embracing them. Their shared refusal to fit in became a kind of harmony in itself. And as the lights dimmed over the Hollywood Hills, I couldn’t help but think: in a world that rewards safety, these bands remain gloriously untamed.
Follow Snarky Puppy on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Follow Hiatus Kaiyote on Facebook, X and Instagram.
*********************
LIVE CLIPS
