By Jeff Tamarkin. Photo by Alysse Gafkjen

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Bill Frisell, no slouch on the guitar himself, has this to say about Julian Lage: “There’s his astounding technique, and it’s mind-blowing, but that doesn’t mean anything without the human element. There’s so much more going on—the way he listens, the humility. He’s constantly curious about learning and, somehow, he hasn’t let it go to his head.”

What Frisell describes becomes abundantly apparent when Lage is onstage. At New York’s Village Vanguard, where Lage held court for nearly a week in late July, the 34 year old beamed constantly, even as he unleashed one impossible run after another and presented chordal structures that shouldn’t even exist.

With his cream-colored ‘54 Telecaster dangling from his neck, Lage faced his two bandmates, acoustic bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, with intense concentration while clearly enjoying every moment. Working their way through a set that ran from “Auditorium”—a Lage original from the trio’s new album, View With a Room—to “Emily,” the Johnny Mandel-Johnny Mercer standard on the preceding album, Squint, Lage and his accompanists slipped seamlessly from quick-witted ferocity to honeyed silkiness. Lage’s tone remained clear, his notes defined, his tempo shifts surprising. He understands that music needs to breathe and the importance of allowing his collaborators ample room to make their own judgment calls. Wherever Lage’s guitar-playing takes him, he exudes breathtaking technique but, as Frisell states, Lage never lets his considerable agility take over from the emotional content of his music. And, somehow, he always makes it look so easy.

“If you can make music with the people that you care about, and if you can be around people who really challenge you to be yourself—challenge you to be present, challenge you to listen deeper and relinquish any agenda—then that’s a beautiful path of development,” Lage says prior to one of the Vanguard gigs.

In conversation, too, his enthusiasm, that humbleness—the niceness—shines through. Where some artists—in an interview situation—give off the impression that they’re only talking to a journalist because it’s part of the job, Lage makes his interrogator feel comfortable immediately; there’s never a sense that he thinks he’s doing you a favor. He engages, just as he does when he’s performing to a room filled with both longtime fans and those who may be hearing him for the first time. He laughs often, shows appreciation and gets excited when the interviewer mentions something positive about the music. When he’s told about a young jazz fan who’s recently latched onto his music, Lage becomes practically bubbly: “That’s so great! Tell him to come backstage and say hello!”

One thing that’s thrilling him right now is that he’s recording for Blue Note Records, the storied label currently celebrating its 83rd year. Lage carries on a guitar lineage for the imprint that has included, over the decades, the likes of Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, Stanley Jordan and others. “Oh, it’s incredible!” he says. “It’s so cool. Labels are so interesting because they penetrate the culture of the music and even beyond. When you think of Blue Note, you think of a sound and a cast of musicians and a movement in music. To be a jazz musician is to reckon with Blue Note; I’ve been thinking about Blue Note Records since I was eight years old. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I wonder what they do over there.’ My favorite records are from this label. Also, a label is the people who run it. [Blue Note president] Don Was being at the helm is huge. He’s a genius and a brilliant man and a true gentleman, and everyone he works with is just profoundly great. It’s a team effort, and, obviously, I’m part of this, but it’s also the band, our management, the publicity department. There’s a collective story that’s being told, and I’m very fond of how everyone works together.”

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Lage isn’t kidding when he says he’s had jazz on the brain since he was eight. In 1996, a short documentary film, appropriately titled Jules at Eight, portrayed a whiz-kid from Santa Rosa, Calif., who already had more highly developed chops than many seasoned players dream of. A few years later, while still in his teens, Lage was trading licks with the likes of Carlos Santana and serving as a faculty member at Stanford University. His own education eventually took him to the Berklee College of Music, where he graduated in 2008. By then, he’d served as a member of vibraphonist Gary Burton’s band, and as the years went on, he’d go on to work with such heavyweights as John Zorn and Charles Lloyd. (He reprises that collaboration on Lloyd’s own upcoming Blue Note title, Trios: Sacred Thread, which also spotlights percussionist Zakir Hussain.)

Lage released his debut album as a leader, Sounding Point, in 2009, which included such top-shelf guests as Chris Thile and Béla Fleck. That album earned Lage his first of three Grammy nominations in the category of Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Several other solo recordings, as well as collaborative efforts with pianist Fred Hersch, Punch Brothers guitarist Chris Eldridge and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, have followed. Lage has added licks to recordings by artists as diverse as David Grisman and Yoko Ono. After working with a number of different labels, most notably Mack Avenue—for which he released the covers album Love Hurts in 2018, the first to feature Roeder and King—Lage came to Blue Note in 2021, issuing Squint that year. (Squint boasts the same rhythm section featured on both Love Hurts and his latest set.)

The title of the latest release, a twist on the familiar phrase room with a view, was given to Lage by Romero Lubambo, the great Brazilian guitarist. “He told me that, years ago, he had a friend who had an apartment in New York, this tiny, tiny little closet of an apartment,” Lage says. “He would refer to it as a view with a room. It always stuck with me—this notion that you can have a vivid, expansive technicolor experience and still have a relatively small footprint. Songs can be concise. It can be a smaller ensemble. You can have vastness without adding more of anything; it’s really about space and how you perceive that. So, this record, essentially, is a trio record with Dave and Jorge, but it also features Bill. Bill adds all of this color and orchestration and highlights the spatial weight of the music in a really special way. Hence, view with a room; that kind of sums it up to me.”

Bill, of course, refers to Frisell, who teams with Lage on seven of the album’s 10 tracks, effectively converting it into a quartet session. The two guitarists have known each other for many years and have long admired one another’s work. View With a Room is hardly the first time they’ve played together—go to YouTube and search for Frisell and Lage and, guaranteed, you’ll get drawn into their simpatico duets right away. There’s a palpable camaraderie there, and while the two don’t necessarily have much in common stylistically, they each understand the other innately. Lage has undoubtedly learned some lessons from Frisell, who is 37 years his senior. More than anything else, perhaps, Lage has picked up on Frisell’s patience as a player, the notion that it’s OK to leave things out. You can get to that special place without being in a hurry.

But even more important is what Lage has learned from Frisell in terms of attitude. “One of Bill’s many superpowers,” Lage says, “is that he always remains true to himself with incredible integrity, contributing in novel ways to so many projects that bring out the essence of that project. Bill is one of my dearest friends and heroes, and we’ve done so many things together, often very interactive: duos or John Zorn music or in Charles Lloyd’s band together. Preparing for this record, Bill and I talked about it. I said, ‘I’m looking for an extension of our sound, but with a new voice.’

“I was a little nervous to ask Bill to come and play on these things,” Lage continues. “Who am I to ask Bill Frisell to play on my record? Then, of course, Bill being Bill, said, ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to ask.’ The way he produces music and sound and crafts arrangements is so stunning. It doesn’t matter what he plays. When I’m hearing Bill, I’m hearing the history of music and guitar and how he frames it and how he introduces it. It’s mysterious in the sense that nothing’s an obvious conclusion. It always serves the music.”

“I was so happy that he wanted me to do it,” counters Frisell, who says he first met Lage when the latter was in his late teens. “I was thinking of it almost as if I was getting called to play with a singer. What do I do in that situation? I was being more like an orchestrator or something. I don’t feel like I was holding back in any way. I’m just using my instinct for the context that he set up. It was exciting for me to think of it that way. It wasn’t like a contest or something. It’s more like, ‘What can we do together to make a sound?’ I brought a few guitars that I maybe wouldn’t have normally brought: an acoustic guitar and a baritone guitar. It’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is cool. I can try all these different sonic things.’”

Another collaborator on View With a Room was Margaret Glaspy, a singer[1]songwriter who also happens to be Lage’s wife. Glaspy served as the album’s producer. “Margaret and I have been together, as each other’s best friend and musical collaborators, for about 15 years and as a couple more recently,” Lage says. “There’s no one I trust more in the world to be at the helm in the studio, basically saying, ‘OK, you’ve got it,’ or, ‘You don’t, that wasn’t it.’ She has a very profound way of navigating those waters, especially with improvising musicians, because she comes from the world of song and lyrics and arrangements and production. I never feel like she’s going, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ because it was a cool solo. She has that lovely way of nudging us toward it. It’s very direct. It’s kind of surgical and there’s no resistance from me or the band because we trust her so much.”

Lage also holds high praise for Roeder—a Peruvian musician who worked with Lage early in the guitarist’s career, then returned several years later—and King, who is best known for co-founding The Bad Plus. “He’s my partner in crime,” Lage says of Roeder. “Even when I had my previous trio [with bassist Scott Colley and drummer Kenny Wollesen], Jorge’s influence was still always there. I would show him my compositions and we would play the tunes together. He’s family. Dave and I have played together for five or six years, and he is someone I grew up admiring greatly. We set our sights on forming a band or finding an excuse to play together years ago. I had a week at [the New York venue] The Stone, and I had a night with Jorge and Dave. It was the first gig we played together, and it was fantastic. There was something pulling us to play together.”

For their second Blue Note album, the trio decided to include only original Lage compositions, bolstering their relationship as a group producing new music together. “I love writing,” Lage says. “It’s fun to write music that you want to hear. There’s no limit to the music that’s out there. It was also important to me, on this record, to marry the improvisational vocabulary with a compositional vocabulary. That feels sincere. This is a language, and whether it’s being improvised or written, it comes from the same place.”

In some ways, Julian Lage is still that same curious and preternaturally talented youngster seen in Jules at Eight. There is nothing jaded about him, no airs. He is all about discovery and joy. “I look at it with great humility,” Lage says of his life as a musician, using the same word that Frisell applied to him.

“I’m a student of the music and I love it so much. I increasingly see that the music that I love and the people that I love share something in common. There’s something good there, and that’s a wonderful thing,” he adds. “I’m conscious of it, of how lucky I am to do that and explore and be with like-minded people and to be pushed, and to celebrate art. I feel that the work to be done is to stay present with the music, to make more music. I just feel very grateful and curious to be able to ask, ‘What else is possible?’”

Frisell takes a crack at answering that last question. “His appetite for learning is just outrageous,” he says. “I think he understands music deeply enough that he knows that you can never figure it out. I feel like he’s just at the beginning.”