It’s been quite a while now since the twenty-eight year old Julian Lage has been a ‘child’ prodigy but his childlike curiosity about music has never faded. Arclight — out March 11, 2016 from Mack Avenue Records — is his first serious foray into the electric guitar on a record, with a seriously powerful trio and delving further into modern jazz and other forms. All while continuing his penchant for finding creativity and timeless delicacy in pre-Parker jazz.
Trading in his Linda Manzer Blue Note for a Fender Telecaster, guitar maestro also trades in his rhythm section, landing the powerful one he saw backing up Jim Hall many years ago: bassist Scott Colley and drummer Kenny Wollesen.
It’s not as if Lage is just discovering the electric guitar; he got his first one at six years old. In incorporating it into his public repertoire, Lage expands his tonal palette using the fluid and advanced guitar diction that had always existed in his toolbox, only now it gets conveyed via the biting tone of a Tele. He’s also used this occasion to open up on his composing as well to use jazz as one of several means to an end. A first impression of “Fortune Teller” with a muscular pulse and bluesy licks makes one think the Lage has forayed into rock, but imagine that guitar replaced with a piano, and it would fit right in on Keith Jarrett’s Treasure Island.
Lage has that ability to fully incorporate harmony into his lead lines in a sumptuous way, such as on the breezy samba “Supera” and for the swinging, advanced “Activate” his bop lines don’t make the expected note selections. Even less expected is his crashing, atonal climax, something straight from his recent duet partner Nels Cline’s playbook. His stinging guitar is commanding alongside Wolleson’s thundering toms on this Peter Green styled blues number entitled “Prospero.”
While Lage’s originals look forward, his covers gaze in both directions. “I’ll Be Seeing You” is a standard that’s given Lage’s usual buttery treatment but Colley and Wollesen are so closely attuned to his guitar, only briefly breaking out in explicit swing. That same rhythm section gives stout support for a really obscure 1920s ditty called “Nocturne” by British jazz musician and composer Spike Hughes, going against Lage’s countervailing poetic lines that elegantly sketch out Hughes’ melancholy strain. Lage’s handling of WC Handy’s “Harlem Blues” recalls those blurred lines between jazz and western swing, and how joyful that kind of ‘fusion’ can be.
Julian Lage’s wide, expansive take on jazz celebrates folk forms and pre-war music as well as modernity in equal measure and is so mindful of the beauty of melody. It would be easy to hear this and think of another guy with a Telecaster, Bill Frisell. While, yes, Fris fans should love Arclight, Lage’s longtime fans should relish his restlessness. Talent that boundless shouldn’t stay in one place, and thankfully, Lage is plugging in and forging ahead.
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