Concert Reviews of Julian Lage Trio in January 2018

April 17, 2022 Post a Comment

Julian Lage: A Clear-sighted 'Squint'

Past Phillip Lutz I Aug. 3, 2021

*Squint* is Julian Lage's debut on Blue Notation Records.
(Photograph: Alysse Gafkjen)

Clasping his hands to his chest, and so raising them to the heavens, Julian Lage evoked echoes of the exuberant child he was a quarter-century ago, when, equally an 8-year-old guitarist, he achieved a measure of fame as the subject field of an Oscar-nominated documentary called Jules at Eight.

"I tin can't say I feel any different than I did equally a kid, which is peradventure trippy," he declared during a wide-ranging chat in April, the Zoom box barely able to contain his loose-limbed gesticulations.

Exuberance may be Lage's default style, only he had every reason to experience in high spirits. Having ridden a continuous wave of acclaim since his days as a kid prodigy — amongst his many honors are three Grammy nominations — he was, at age 33, on the cusp of a new career milestone: the release of Squint, his first album on Blue Annotation.

Out June eleven, the album — 11 tracks, nine of which are Lage originals — is a singularly modern accept on Blue Annotation tradition, showcasing tunes that both reference classic styles and role as forrad-facing vehicles for improvisation, his transcendent gift. Realized with a production team close to his heart, the album also underlines Lage's skill at cultivating a creative ecosystem that allows him to express that gift in full.

"This tape is a culmination of a lot of stories that have been under style for a while," he said.

Untangling the stories begins with a concert on the Ides of March in 2018. The occasion was the 80th birthday party of saxophonist Charles Lloyd at the Lobero Theater in Lage's hometown of Santa Rosa, California. Lloyd had been signed to Blue Notation by Don Was, the record company's president. Was, a bassist, sat in with the band midway through the concert. Lage, who had played on and off with Lloyd since his prodigy days, was besides part of the ring.

Was had long been impressed by Lage's work with Lloyd. His admiration grew at the Lobero and heightened further vi months later at the Monterey Jazz Festival. There, Lage played a scintillating gear up with his trio, which included Jorge Roeder on bass and Eric Doob on drums. It was the first fourth dimension Was had seen the trio in that kind of charged environment.

"I was absolutely blown abroad past it," Was recalled in a telephone interview. "They had an eternal groove and were completely in sync."

Lage and Was talked at Monterey. That led to further conversations, which, Lage stressed, were non well-nigh signing the guitarist — until, that is, his contract with Mack Avenue lapsed. "He was so gracious about making it not about concern," Lage said. "It wasn't like, 'Julian, I pick you lot.' It was similar, 'Let everyone else figure information technology out. We have a rapport. If it works, we're going to make it happen.' And am I glad information technology did."

So, besides, was Was: "I knew he'd be an asset. He really understood the ethos and spirit of the label's legacy. He was coming from that place, a modern version of it."

As dazzling as the trio had been at Monterey, it was to undergo i alter before the group moved into the studio. A month before the jazz festival, in Baronial, Lage had booked a calendar week at The Stone at the New School, the new dwelling house to John Zorn'southward long-loved serial of concerts. On one of the nights, Lage brought in a trio consisting of Roeder, with whom he'd had a working human relationship for more than than a decade, and drummer Dave King, whom he had known only in passing.

King, the drummer for The Bad Plus, striking information technology off with Lage and Roeder. "Information technology was just kind of immediate," Lage said. "The mode nosotros played together fabricated a lot of sense. Information technology felt complementary musically and personally, this kind of celebration of improvised music equally the centerpiece of a band'southward direction rather than, 'We're about songs and, oh yeah, we take solos.'"

King recalled, "That sort of ignited us to play together."

In September, when it came fourth dimension to record what would be Lage's terminal album on Mack Artery, Love Hurts, Lage enlisted Rex and Roeder. While the album is a trio try, like Lage'due south two previous discs — Arclight (released in 2016) and Modern Lore (2018), both with Scott Colley on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums — Love Hurts adopts a somewhat freer arroyo in a drove largely of covers. Ornette Coleman's "Tomorrow Is The Question" is a standout, presaging the breakout work that is Squint.

Squint, for its function, had to overcome obstacles before it was made. Afterwards Love Hurts was released in February 2019, Lage, Roeder and Rex did some promising runs that culminated in a week at the Village Vanguard in January 2020. "That's what it was all working toward," Lage said. "'Let's write music, permit's throw it all out, permit'southward write some more, show it at the Vanguard, edit that, so go make a record.'" They set a February date to tape in New York. That appointment was pushed back to March when Roeder sustained an injury.

So the pandemic hit. As virus rates rose in New York, the venue was shifted to Nashville and the date pushed to August. In anticipation, Lage and Margaret Glaspy, his wife and producer, rented a firm in East Nashville. That was in June. "Nosotros idea that volition give u.s. time to movement down there, set up shop, piece of work, work, work, write, write, write, do the record," Lage said.

"Frankly, the process wasn't novel," he added. "I just had the space and fourth dimension to luxuriate in information technology. My thing has always been, you lot write for the tape. You write 30 or 40 songs; you lot choice your favorite 10. And if you tin't work those into a place where they feel really neat, you go into some of the other 30 and and so you come back and you plug and play and just endeavor make a nice narrative. So it'southward a little flake of quantity over quality for me, and then it becomes nigh the quality and fine-tuning."

Simply as August approached and the fine-tuning was finishing, the projection again appeared imperiled. Virus rates were rising in Nashville. Lage said he was worried: "I called Don and said, 'Should I flake this now? Should this exist a solo guitar record? I want to make this tape, but I don't want to put people at chance.'"

Was eased Lage's concerns. "I was certainly encouraging them to become together and play," he said. "People started condign enlightened effectually that time that you could in fact safely make a record; but wear masks and don't have a lot of people hanging out. It would accept been spirit-crushing for him to have all this music built up inside him and non be able to realize information technology."

Roeder and Male monarch traveled to Lage'south Nashville house, where the trio spent a long mean solar day releasing pent-up energy in rehearsal. Roeder described the moment: "I felt our excitement to play and make something happen, something that I hadn't experienced in the longest [time]. I had not made music with other people for months."

After the rehearsal, Lage recalled, he sent Was the day'south audio prune: "He said, 'You audio like you've been on the road six months straight. Information technology'due south killing. Absolutely go.' The funny irony is, we went in the studio and recorded the first day. The music was more delicate. With 'lights, camera, action,' you lose some of that wild and woolly adventure. I sent that first twenty-four hours to Don and his comment was, 'It's great, just you lot don't have to be polite on this one. Let there be drain. Go to that thing you practice when you're just in the house playing.'"

And that is what they did. Glaspy, with whom Lage had collaborated as a songwriter and performer periodically for more than a decade — they married in December — was tasked with keeping the musicians on the straight-and-narrow: "She'd be listening to the music and say, 'OK, cool, but please become for information technology. That was nice, that was lovely, very professional. Just you don't listen to one another.' She'd say these things that only she could say considering there's so much trust and respect."

It too cruel to Glaspy, who was intimate with Lage'due south housebound predilections — which had only intensified during the pandemic — to brand sure those predilections were reflected in the ring's music. At dwelling, she said, Lage was spending hours listening — gleaning phrasing ideas from musicians like Ornette Coleman and Jim Hall, just also from the cadences of speakers and writers like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King.

"Information technology was fun," she said, "to lookout man him connect those dots and see how they played into his ain playing. Not everybody knows he's fascinated by those things. But I take a special bird's-centre view of knowing what he's working on at home every single 24-hour interval and once he gets to the studio, kind of trying to run up those two environments together."

The album'southward other producer, guitarist Armand Hirsch, was, Lage said, likewise a trusted prepare of ears, particularly from the perspective of an instrumentalist: "I'd say, 'Is this referencing the correct guitar thing? I'm looking for an early George Barnes kind of matter through this kind of amp.' And he'd say, 'OK, brand this kind of adjustment.' It'due south having people who support y'all and understand."

Along with engineer Mark Goodell, the squad agreed that, to go on information technology real, all barriers — physical and psychological — had to exist removed. The players moved equally close to one some other as possible while maintaining pandemic protocols. Baffling and headphones were banished. At the same fourth dimension, Lage said: "I asked myself: 'Is in that location whatever blurriness that I can bring back to the music?' I was trying to invite a picayune more irrational nature to information technology — things that on the 1 hand could exist extremely melodic merely also somewhat advanced, dealt with in a way that a lot of my heroes dealt with information technology."

The result captures the spirit and some of the language of those heroes, filtered through Lage's sensibility. "Familiar Flower," for case, treads on treacherous terrain equally information technology honors Coleman and his alumni group from the 1970s and '80s, Sometime and New Dreams. As the piece unfolds, the players, moving at a withering pace inside an asymmetric rhythmic structure, begin to pull away from each other in a process of increasing brainchild, only to snap back together in a remarkable display of collective absurd. The odd, angular stops in the head alone would drive lesser players to distraction.

Said King: "You realize, 'Oh, my God, he wrote those, they're non only him whipping away in there. Oh, God, I take to deal with that information.'"

Like "Familiar Flower," the championship track takes the players to unexpected places. The runway references some other Lage hero, drummer Baton Higgins, who played with Coleman in the 1950s, with a raft of Blue Note stars in the '60s and with Lage a few times decades hence later an introduction by Lloyd. On it, Lage happens on a chip of complimentary association, assigning notes to an unaccompanied Billy Higgins solo and, in translating them to guitar, triggering a connection with pianist Lennie Tristano's "Line Upward," a seven-chorus spray of bouncing eighth notes.

"In a manner," he said, "it's a celebration of Higgins and Tristano together in this imaginary world called swing."

In their particular take on swing, "Squint" and, no less, "Familiar Bloom," serve as yardsticks separating the current trio's sound from that of the one-time. "At that place might be a more collaborative sense of where the beat is, how the fourth dimension is passed effectually," Lage said. "If y'all're looking at just the musical differences betwixt Arclight and Modern Lore compared to Love Hurts and Squint, I think at that place is a celebration of maybe a more enigmatic sense of fourth dimension."

That sense of time every bit enigmatic, he added, might have adult with the previous trio. Time, in Lage'due south musical universe, seems increasingly to be a mutable construct — and that, Lage said, is more than a reflection of his growing association with Zorn's school of free improvisation than of any personnel modify. Lage has appeared live with Zorn — notably with Roeder and Wollesen in the saxophonist's New Masada Quartet — and on a half-dozen Zorn albums since 2018.

Any is shaping Lage's thinking, information technology is a thread that runs through much of the album. Even tunes underpinned by unassuming rhythmic references — "Twilight Surfer" and "Day And Age," with their relaxed shuffles; "Saint Rose," with its easy backbeat — are given to subtle metric twists, precipitous harmonic turnarounds and other tactics of disorientation that compel the kind of improvisational elasticity he craves.

"These are songs I needed to hear myself play," he said. "These are songs that felt like they worked in tandem with the learning I was doing and am coming to practice almost the world. They were songs that felt appropriate. It's music for an audience of ane."

Exercising his prerogative as a programmer, Lage reaches back to the lyrical side of the 1960s for even so another song he needed to play: "Emily," the oft-covered Johnny Mandel waltz. "There is a handful of tunes I learned as a young person that I've always wanted to put out in the world," Lage said. "When information technology came time to put a record together, information technology felt like it was fourth dimension to re-
introduce it. It felt like what nosotros were trying to say with this record is, 'I'1000 in love with jazz, I'1000 in love with the culture of jazz.'"

"Emily" was recorded toward the stop of four 10-60 minutes, fully masked days in the Sound Emporium'south big, dry room — an experience, Lage said, that left anybody light-headed. Just its inclusion makes sense. With the oestrus turned down on the ballad, the tape'southward sonic strategy is exposed — and to great effect. The elimination of barriers reveals what might accept seemed a lite colloquy to take a raw quality reminiscent of another era, even equally the improvisation is of today, or tomorrow.

The aesthetic, Male monarch said, is quintessential Lage: "It's got some historical perspective and some hereafter kind of interplay."

For all the anthology's brilliant coaction, it may be Lage's single solo offer, "Étude," in which the essence of his improvisational gift becomes most apparent. The tune, written at the end of March 2020, kicked off the writing of the Squint book and opens the album.

In it, he calls to mind the spirited kid who reveled in his own facility — effortlessly and elegantly weaving open strings, double-stops and idiosyncratic contrapuntal gestures into a narrative map for this project and, perhaps, projects to come up.

"It isn't only pretty," he said. "Information technology has a certain kind of evocative dazzler which I think is primarily based on the harmonic decisions. That became the North Star of the other music — can information technology be challenging for the instrument, because with that comes a certain kind of excitement and exhilaration." DB