Jazz virtuoso Julian Lage reveals what led him to meld acoustic and electric on his gorgeous new album, Speak to Me.
BY JIMMY LESLIE
AT A RECENT show in San Francisco promoted by Guitar PlayerPresents, Julian Lage reminded us that he is to be counted among the premiere acoustic guitar players on the planet. That refresher can also be had by listening to his new Blue Note album, Speak to Me. Although Lage is widely recognized as an electric-guitar jazz wunderkind (because that’s been his primary instrument), Speak to Mefinds him playing both electric and, mostly, acoustic, delivering a treat we don’t hear from him very often. On it, the guitarist performs unbridled steel-string acoustic in myriad settings, from solo to sextet, and covers every aspect — rhythm and lead, structured and improvised — effortlessly.
“Hymnal,” the pensive opener, is like a sunrise, while “Myself Around You” is a stellar solo acoustic excursion that features fabulous pull-off trills and thrilling bursts of creative chord clusters.
“Omission,” the breezy album single, features Lage’s unplugged flights of fancy backed by a deep pocket of drums and bass. Other songs, such as “Two and One,” “Vanishing Points” and “South Mountain,” feature keyboard and woodwind accompaniment that ranges from sparse and peaceful to wild and outside. It all comes together on the tour de force shuffle “76” Of course, watching Lage perform at SFJazz in San Francisco’s Miner Auditorium before a sell-out crowd was a joy to behold. Equipped solely with his signature Collings steel-string, and completely unencumbered by electronics (or even a guitar strap), Lage sat on a stool before a single microphone. He almost always uses a pick and doesn’t rely on any tricks, except the sleight of hand that makes you forget there’s no band. A true-blue artist, he paints masterpieces right in front of you, one after another, each as unique as a snowflake. He’s not simply filling in outlines from song sketches but seems to be drawing from scratch as he considers the appropriate colors for each note of every tune in that moment.
Lage’s virtuosic musicality is utterly compelling in a solo setting, and his skillfulness is technically dazzling, but never flashy. He does none of the demonstrative flailing of a modern percussive fingerstylist. Nor does he strain to entertain with amusing anecdotes in the spirit of his hero Leo Kottke, with whom he toured last year. Neither does Lage need to sing, because his voice on t
