Julian Lage Quartet
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Presented by PDX Jazz
About
In the waning days of 2024, Julian Lage began what he calls a writing sprint. Lage has long been prolific: In the three decades since the documentary Jules at Eight identified him as a prodigy, Lage has made a dozen records with his own bands and duos, and three times that many with leading lights of his artistic orbit, like John Zorn, Gary Burton, and Charles Lloyd. But Lage was preparing for a four-day residency at SFJAZZ, plus the premiere of a new quartet of old collaborators and friends who had strangely never recorded together: Lage with steadfast bassist Jorge Roeder, dynamic drummer Kenny Wollesen, and vaunted keyboardist John Medeski. As he thought about their qualities as players and hypothesized about how they might interact, he set a timer for 20 minutes, wrote a tune, recorded it once, and then began again.
That is the spirit of Scenes from Above, Lage’s second full-length album with the producer Joe Henry and his first with this striking quartet. Where 2024’s Speak to Me was Lage’s grand statement as an improvising bandleader capable of helming a relatively large ensemble through a diverse set of tunes, Scenes from Above is about being a band member himself, about Lage exploring the tunes he has written with a crew he has built with that entirely in mind. Its nine tracks frame a brilliantly open experience, with four astounding players giving and taking space in equal measure as they explore these songs in one space, in real time.
Also, Lage was in a deep period of thinking about what he calls folkloric music, from the songs of Susana Baca and early calypso numbers to the American blues and Béla Bartók’s integration of Romanian and Hungarian tunes into his own work. His writing reflected those touchstones. And as the two-day session at New York’s Sear Sound began to near, he also thought about texture and timbre, about how he could use his instrument to avoid the familiar terrain and potential pitfalls of the guitar trio-plus-organ configuration.
By the time they reach the end of “Something More,” this quartet is a band that has instantly found its rapport. Sad and sweet, this feels like a four-part prayer, a shared wish for better days ahead. That they handle a song like this with such finesse and warmth on a first or second take, as with every track on Scenes from Above, remains a testament to the concept, to freedom, and, between them both, to trust.
“I came in with a desire to present this as an egalitarian thing, rather than ‘I’m the leader — let’s build something around me,’” Lage confirms. “This is music that’s connected to our own growth and development individually and within our relationships with one another, with no sense that anybody’s expecting anything.”
In spite of the caliber of players on Scenes from Above, the tracks hover around the four-minute mark, the result of the restraint they felt in a studio where they could play quietly and still be heard. That is what makes Scenes from Above so poignant and timely — four dazzling instrumentalists in a room, talking to one another but never actually over one another.
That is the spirit of Scenes from Above, Lage’s second full-length album with the producer Joe Henry and his first with this striking quartet. Where 2024’s Speak to Me was Lage’s grand statement as an improvising bandleader capable of helming a relatively large ensemble through a diverse set of tunes, Scenes from Above is about being a band member himself, about Lage exploring the tunes he has written with a crew he has built with that entirely in mind. Its nine tracks frame a brilliantly open experience, with four astounding players giving and taking space in equal measure as they explore these songs in one space, in real time.
Also, Lage was in a deep period of thinking about what he calls folkloric music, from the songs of Susana Baca and early calypso numbers to the American blues and Béla Bartók’s integration of Romanian and Hungarian tunes into his own work. His writing reflected those touchstones. And as the two-day session at New York’s Sear Sound began to near, he also thought about texture and timbre, about how he could use his instrument to avoid the familiar terrain and potential pitfalls of the guitar trio-plus-organ configuration.
By the time they reach the end of “Something More,” this quartet is a band that has instantly found its rapport. Sad and sweet, this feels like a four-part prayer, a shared wish for better days ahead. That they handle a song like this with such finesse and warmth on a first or second take, as with every track on Scenes from Above, remains a testament to the concept, to freedom, and, between them both, to trust.
“I came in with a desire to present this as an egalitarian thing, rather than ‘I’m the leader — let’s build something around me,’” Lage confirms. “This is music that’s connected to our own growth and development individually and within our relationships with one another, with no sense that anybody’s expecting anything.”
In spite of the caliber of players on Scenes from Above, the tracks hover around the four-minute mark, the result of the restraint they felt in a studio where they could play quietly and still be heard. That is what makes Scenes from Above so poignant and timely — four dazzling instrumentalists in a room, talking to one another but never actually over one another.
