Ever since his emergence as an estimable child prodigy, guitarist-composer Julian Lage has been inscrutable, a cryptically melodic improviser, a labyrinthine chord inversionist-progressionist, an acoustic-electric technician — all with the fleet-fingered feel of a Segovia-meets-Fripp wunderkind, yet with all the groove, soul and nuance of a Wes Montgomery and a plonk of skronk — to go with an air of personable intelligence that screams, “That’s right, I named my second album after Malcolm Gladwell,” but likely because naming an album Roland Barthes had no real vibe to it.
Inscrutable, perhaps, but then again I’ve never tried to “scrut” him (a bon mot from Lester Bangs), nor have I come close to interviewing the sage Julian Lage, until now.
On the occasion of his blunt but lyrical new Blue Note album Scenes from Above, and weeks before his long-anticipated work as part of saxophonist Joe Lovano’s stirring Paramount Quartet sees release, Lage sat down for a cool, calm chat about what it means to make music in the present tense, without the present’s tension.
“Everything has changed and nothing has changed since my start,” Lage says about the connection of his past to his now, in a slow, soft-spoken manner that immediately directs you to listen with greater intensity.
“I was fortunate to grow up as a player, not necessarily in the public eye — I was very nurtured, very supported — while still working within other people’s bands, before my start as a leader. I guess I kept to myself, as often as I was out.”
One could say there’s still a big part of this within Lage, given his proclivity for solo guitar — in fact entire tours of just solo guitar:
Before his auspicious 2009 debut Sounding Point, with name-above-the-title contributors Béla Fleck and Chris Thile — Lage’s credits include several albums with vibraphonist-composer Gary Burton’s ensemble, and playing for drummer Terri Lyne Carrington on More to Say. It is, additionally, important to note that the soulful Cali-born guitarist hung out the longest with intense noisemaking New York saxophonist, organist and composer John Zorn, on 24 albums (six in 2023, three in 2024) and countless live gigs. (JazzTimes covered some of that acoustic guitar-centric output last summer.)
Suddenly, when Lage says, “This is a life, one life, rather than, say, an aesthetic,” it makes more than a little sense. Always playing to the sonic strengths of maintaining solace and serenity while acting with cross-cutting complexity is second nature to Lage. Whether within the eye of Zorn’s storm, Burton’s rangy plains or the soulful skies of Lovano’s new quartet, Lage was born ready.
“It’s always about going deeper, broader and cultivating relationships while remaining true to who I am… having the permission to doing these additional projects without leaving myself behind.”
Lage makes sure to note that he does it all, leader albums and sideman gigs, with a commitment to spirituality, “compassion and love,” and always with a “sense of community” and “service to the music” as opposed to say some lone wolf, single-shooter status.
Listening to Speak to Me (2024) and the new Scenes from Above in one serving, there is a depth and brightness to both, beyond that of his other records, a vibrant chiaroscuro weightiness containing widely dispersed light and radiant volume.
In a sense, especially on the latter album, it is almost as if Lage has found “pop.” Or at least the spirit and playfully taut spaciousness of pop (so, loose yet tight) within a jazz continuum, without the former’s foamy frothy folderol. Or a way to take such dispersed brightness and sharpen it like a laser beam for a blunter, sharper ray of light.
How did Lage, to borrow from Leonard Cohen, find the crack so to make the light pour in with such focus?
And speaking of light, is the literal and figurative conversation among Lage, his collaborators and his producers — a team of seven on one album and five on the other — meant to exploit that of the present day, or avoid it all? Tackle the hate and the weight of the world, or move past it, groove on and play merrily?
Living Within the Music
Existential dilemmas aside, Lage talks about the group of musicians who made up Space from Above — keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder, drummer Kenny Wollesen — not as people who lived within this material, but rather as guys who “got together the day before we hit ‘record.’ Yes, there were songs that fit Medeski or a strength I know that Jorge has — those tracks were the first that we cut. But I know these players well. You can write all you want, for as long as you want, for whoever you want, but does it sound good coming out of speakers? With these players and these songs, I knew that it would. I enjoy the humility of that.”
Certainly, Lage’s past relationship with Medeski has meant playing in the pocket, “lots of jamming, in-the-groove stuff,” Lage relates. “That’s his strength. Love that. He’s a master. And yet there were other occasions where I played with John, and there was such poetry to what he was doing, so much space, so much melodicism. I know John to be a reflective and kind person of the highest order.”
For Scenes from Above, Lage fought the urge toward the funk and went for the spacey, ruminative, melodic Medeski, something more centered and soulful, and winnowed that into a cohesive sound. “John has a real calming energy on this record,” says Lage. “That’s very cool. If you want the rocket ship to fuel up and blast off fast, these guys could do that too… [But] this is pretty flexible music. Nothing overly didactic. Then again, that’s why I like having a producer, so I can focus on playing, as if someone else wrote the music. I like living within the music, which alleviates having to oversee it all.”
These two most recent Lage albums were produced by Joe Henry, famously behind the boards for albums by Carolina Chocolate Drops and Solomon Burke. As far as their conversation goes, Speak to Me was geared toward expanding on the guitarist’s trio sound and “luxuriating” through orchestral space — a core and its perimeter, coloring within those lines.
“With Space from Above, there is no perimeter,” says Lage. “Everyone was integral. The improvisers were the orchestrators — how we accompany, how we arrange, the power dynamic. There was nothing later. It was all now. And Joe is an immaculate producer. Nothing gets by him. He knows this music.”
One Big Song
Out of nowhere, Lage mentions a connection between Scenes from Above and Money Jungle, the legendary 1963 blunt-cut jazz work by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, a master class in succinct but free-for-all expression among three very different players.
“We’re going to have some classic styles, and then things that are more fleeting,” says Lage. “That temperament and those conversations are second nature to Joe Henry.”
I use the word “blunt” again when touching on Scenes from Above, as most of the guitarist-composer’s new album rolls on in short, sharp bursts — save for the extended Dionysian blues of “Night Shade,” with organist Medeski and Lage languishing comfortably within each other’s solo runs.
“I can say that so much of Scenes from Above’s songs get to the heart of the matter of whatever it is, and then move on,” says Lage, as if he’s hearing this album for the first time. “It’s nine songs, but it feels as if it is really one big song, where everything has its own place. There’s a ballad, some freer songs, a calypso song, something that swings, something blues — a diverse compositional palette with one tone.”
Thinking of more Lage music, the guitarist is thrilled to hear that his work with one of his heroes from his school days, Joe Lovano, is finally coming to fruition this spring. “I would call Joe from time to time and remind him that I was ready and anxious to play, yet it took Joe seeing me live with Zorn to realize how I could fit and what I could do with this trio he had working. The DNA of that band is all Joe — it’s fluid and swinging in Joe’s most miraculous way… He’s got a big book of music, way more than what we recorded on that album.”
I tell Lage that what he has recorded, after all, is an audio version of a microdrama, that wildly popular, streaming televisual form perfect for vertical viewing, without a heavy agenda from its maker other than “a lot of freedom, then catharsis.”
“Whatever was needed could happen,” says Lage of this latest sliver of beauty. “You light the fuse, and then you go.” JT