Julian Lage expands his horizons on View With A Room.

Julian Lage expands his horizons on his second release for Blue Note Records “View With A Room”. Together with his trio consisting of bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, most recently heard on his 2021 Blue Note debut Squint, Lage casts his gaze outward to discover new orchestrational possibilities with the addition of Bill Frisell, who adds his inimitable voice to this stunning album.

View With A Room is set for release on September 16th and is currently available for pre-order on vinyl, CD, and digital formats. In addition to the release of the album, Lage has also announced his Autumn U.S. tour View With A Room In Concert, which kicks off September 13. Lage’s Summer tour schedule also included a week at the Village Vanguard in New York City in July as well as performances across Canada and Europe. See a full list of dates below and find ticket info at Julian’s website here.

Lage is counted among the absolute top in jazz, but also in folk/bluegrass and avant-garde circles. Lage started his career as a child prodigy on blues guitar and at the age of eleven he could already count top musicians such as Gary Burton, Santana among his fans. He took the step into jazz under the watchful eye of Jim Hall, and since then he has played as a sideman alongside icons such as Charles Lloyd and John Zorn, in duo form with Nels Cline, Chris Eldridge and Fred Hersch, and as a bandleader..

“In so many ways, I’ve wanted to make this record for years,” says Lage. “It comes from a line of musical inquiry: can you have lush orchestration combined with an organic sense of improvisation and the agility of a small ensemble?”

Without bolstering the line-up with additional instrumentation and more intricate writing, thus losing the maneuverability and venturesome spontaneity that he’s honed with Roeder and King over the last several years, Lage found his solution where he so often does: in the guitar.

“The answer came from some of the historical references that matter to me about the electric guitar,” Lage explains. “There’s a certain lineage that grows out of early pioneers like Jimmy Bryant and George Barnes and Charlie Christian, where there’s this almost electric volatility to the sound. It’s both beautiful and kind of sharp; it’s subdued and warm, but also kind of gritty. In thinking about the orchestration for this album, I wanted to foster the point of that arrow.”

There’s no one better suited to understanding what Lage was seeking, who is better versed in the history of guitar and jazz and beyond, its personalities and possibilities, than Bill Frisell. Frisell has worked with Lage in several different contexts, including duo concerts and projects devised by John Zorn, and enhances Lage’s vision in atmospheric and incisive ways throughout View With A Room. The pair honed in on a shorthand vocabulary rich with references as diverse as the Beach Boys, Keith Jarrett’s American and European Quartets, and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. The two guitarists’ subtle weave is at the heart of “Auditorium,” where Frisell’s agile rhythm work buoys Lage’s eloquent leads atop the gracefully subtle propulsion of Roeder and King.

“There’s no one I would trust more than Bill Frisell to come into our trio ecosystem and be able to expand it while totally embracing it,” Lage says. “It became a beautiful collaboration that achieved the Technicolor experience that I’ve been searching for.”

A View With A Room was produced by Margaret Glaspy, his wife and musical partner who brings her own insights as a singer-songwriter to the lyrical and storytelling aspects that make Lage’s compositions so singular. She worked closely at Brooklyn’s Bridge Studios with engineer Mark Goodell, who Lage credits with “wrangling this album into a sonic place that references what we love best about classic Blue Note records while still feeling utterly contemporary and unique to the sound of this band.” Lage’s longtime friend and collaborator Armand Hirsch added integral post-production elements that bring the emotional intent of each song into focus.

Line-up:
Julian Lage, Guitar | Jorge Roeder, Bass | Dave King | Bill Frisell, Guitar

Release Date: 16 September 2022
Format: CD | LP | Digital
Label: Blue Note Records

Featured Image by Shervin Lainez

New Release Spotify Playlist

The Jazz In Europe New Release playlist features tracks from the new releases featured on Jazz In Europe. Updated weekly, this playlist is the perfect place to discover new music from the leading jazz musicians currently on the scene. We hope you enjoy this selection.