Michael League was born on April 24, 1984, in Long Beach, California, and grew up in a military family that moved through Alabama and Virginia. He took up violin in fourth grade, moved to guitar in middle school and settled on bass at 17, when his high school jazz band needed a bassist. As a teenager in Vienna, Virginia, he played rock guitar solos over gospel music in a church band. His brother, a heavy metal drummer who also loved jazz, handed him Steely Dan and Frank Zappa records as a way in, and the jazz he fell for first was Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass.

He enrolled in the jazz studies program at the University of North Texas in Denton. By his own account he could not get placed in any of the school's ensembles as a freshman, so in 2004 he gathered nine classmates and started a band of his own. He called it Snarky Puppy, after the mixed-breed quality of its music. The group's first gig was in a pizza restaurant, and in 2005 it issued a self-released live CD, Live at Uncommon Ground. After graduating League stayed in the Dallas area for about three years inside the city's gospel and R&B scene, under the unofficial mentorship of the keyboardist Bernard Wright, working with Walter Hawkins, Kirk Franklin, Marvin Sapp and Israel Houghton and playing regularly in the backing band of Erykah Badu, the Gritz.

The Only Constant (2006) was the first of three albums on the Sitmom label. In 2009 League and much of the band moved to Brooklyn, where they built an audience through relentless touring, filming their sessions for DVD and YouTube as they went. Tell Your Friends (2010) and the live-in-the-studio groundUP (2012) were followed by League's own label, GroundUP Music, which became the home for Snarky Puppy and for a widening circle of related artists, among them Banda Magda, whose Yerakina he co-produced, and the band Forq, which he co-founded with the keyboardist Henry Hey. Family Dinner - Volume 1, recorded in March 2013 before an audience at the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, Virginia, paired the band with guest vocalists. On January 26, 2014, its Brenda Russell cover "Something," sung by Lalah Hathaway, won the Grammy for Best R&B Performance. We Like It Here, recorded live over four nights in the Netherlands in October 2013 and released February 25, 2014, caught the band at its most improvisational.

In 2015 the band recorded Sylva with the Dutch Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley. League has said it was the first music he had ever written for an orchestra. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart and won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album at the 58th Grammy Awards in 2016. Culcha Vulcha (April 29, 2016) took the same award the following year, and the band said it was the first Grammy it had won for a record of its own music with no special guests. League also started Bokanté in 2016 with the Caribbean-born, Montreal-based singer Malika Tirolien. Its lyrics are mostly in Creole and French, and League describes it as a blues band tracing the music of the African diaspora through West African, Arabic, Caribbean and North American sources. Strange Circles (GroundUP, 2017) was followed by What Heat (Real World Records, September 28, 2018), made with the Metropole Orkest and Buckley, with League playing oud among other instruments, which was nominated for Best World Music Album at the 62nd Grammy Awards. History arrived in 2023.

League produced David Crosby's Lighthouse (GroundUP, October 21, 2016), bringing in the singers Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis, and then served as musical director of Crosby's Lighthouse Band on tour. The quartet of Crosby, Stevens, Willis and League recorded Here If You Listen (BMG, October 26, 2018), with League producing and playing bass, guitars and Minimoog bass, and toured for six weeks that November and December. Crosby passed away in January 2023. Back with Snarky Puppy, Immigrance (March 15, 2019) debuted at No. 2 on the Jazz Albums chart, and Live at the Royal Albert Hall, recorded on November 14, 2019 and released on March 6, 2020, won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards in 2021.

League bought a house in Els Prats de Rei, a village in Catalonia about an hour from Barcelona, in 2020 and moved in at the start of 2021. He recorded So Many Me (GroundUP, June 25, 2021) as a one-man album, playing every instrument himself, and spent the period producing across languages: Susana Baca's Palabras Urgentes, the fado singer Gisela João's Aurora and Becca Stevens and the Secret Trio, all in 2021. He studied the oud and the daf with master musicians in Istanbul and elsewhere, and he plays the oud on his duo records with Bill Laurance, Where You Wish You Were (ACT, January 27, 2023) and Keeping Company (ACT, October 31, 2024). He joined the faculty of the Conservatori del Liceu in Barcelona in the autumn of 2021, teaching bass and album production and founding the Liceu BLAM Collective, a student ensemble devoted to Black American music, the same season that Bill McHenry led a student ensemble at the school. Empire Central, recorded live before a studio audience at the Deep Ellum Art Company in Dallas and released September 30, 2022, was a tribute to the Black music of the city that had shaped him, and it won the band's fourth Best Contemporary Instrumental Album Grammy at the 65th Grammy Awards in 2023. That year League also produced the Cuban pianist Harold López-Nussa's Timba a la Americana for Blue Note.

Since then he has kept up a pace few bandleaders match. League co-produced Youssou N'Dour's Éclairer le monde - Light the World (2025), which was nominated for Best Global Music Album at the 68th Grammy Awards on February 1, 2026, and Snarky Puppy released Somni in November 2025, a second collaboration with the Metropole Orkest, recorded live over three nights in January 2025 in the Netherlands. On January 16, 2026, he released Elipsis on GroundUP with the Cuban percussionist and singer Pedrito Martínez and the Mexican drummer Antonio Sánchez. For January 2026 the Blue Note in New York scheduled him for much of the month, and SFJAZZ named him a 2026 Resident Artistic Director, with a week of concerts planned from January 28 to February 1. A United States leg of the Somni tour was scheduled for September 29 to October 22, 2026. As of early 2026 he is based in Catalonia. Snarky Puppy has won five Grammy Awards under his leadership.

League's music sits in the overlap of several traditions, and he is open about where the boundaries fall. The DownBeat writer who profiled the band in 2022 called it "more jazz adjacent than jazz," and League agrees that Snarky Puppy is not playing straight-ahead jazz, while pointing out that everyone in the band is a jazz musician: the harmonic vocabulary and the freedom to improvise come from jazz, packaged in grooves, hooks and a rock, funk and gospel backbeat. He has called the band a pop group that improvises a great deal and has no vocals, and he names Steely Dan and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters as its two biggest models, along with Dallas's Black American music scene and the large-ensemble sounds of Roy Hargrove's RH Factor, Avishai Cohen's International Vamp Band and Dave Holland's quintet. His writing is orchestral in instinct: he arranges while composing and teaches the parts to the band by ear from audio demos, not charts, which is how a 19-player group stays tight on the road.

The R&B and gospel side is documented plainly in the record. His Dallas years were spent playing church music and R&B, his first Grammy went to a vocal soul performance with Lalah Hathaway, and Empire Central is a love letter to that scene. The world-music side runs through Bokanté, his study of the oud, the daf and other Middle Eastern and North African instruments, and his production work for Susana Baca, Gisela João and Youssou N'Dour. The jazz-side credentials are just as concrete: jazz studies training at North Texas, four Best Contemporary Instrumental Album Grammys, Jazz Albums chart placements at No. 1 and No. 2, repeated wins in the Jazz Group category of the DownBeat Readers Poll, a 2026 post as Resident Artistic Director at SFJAZZ, and a working circle that includes Pedrito Martínez, Antonio Sánchez, Mark Guiliana, Nate Smith and Kendrick Scott. As a bassist he plays electric bass and Moog bass most often in the band, switching to oud, fretless guitar bass and acoustic guitar in the duo and Bokanté settings.