A chugging backbeat and twinkling keys herald ‘Opal’ and its shifting patchwork of colours, at once common and precious, an interplay of stunning rainbow iridescences with a more muted or earthy palette of sweet honeyed reds and yellows or Tiffany blues and milky greens. The song leads out Scenes from Above, the guitarist Julian Lage’s fifth outing on Blue Note Records, and as his stepwise chromaticism begins to elaborate the piece, his newest band member John Medeski begins to deliver a sustained if slightly woozy brightness from behind the organ and the guitar doubles back on itself, developing over again its burgeoning theme.
In the meantime Kenny Wollesen on the drums embellishes the sense of momentum while Jorge Roeder on the double bass connects the staggered elements of the quartet. His plangent tone, with a swallowing percussive character, sometimes spare but always in rich harmony and deep sympathy with Lage wherever it appears, here serves to bind the ensemble through little nubs and roots and crevices among other entanglements as together they ascend to burrow or burrow to ascend.
At the outset of his career as a bandleader Lage worked with a couple of larger ensembles before straddling a handful of duets with Chris Eldridge, Fred Hersch and Nels Cline. The cherished World’s Fair – his fond and fondly received solo showcase – gave way to his first trio album Arclight with Scott Colley on the double bass and Kenny Wollesen then as his drummer of choice.
Modern Lore expanded this particular trio before Love Hurts marked a change of course as Lage, for the first time turned producer, reassembled with his old collaborative partner the bassist Jorge Roeder while Dave King completed the new trio behind the drum kit. The same small ensemble then made the jump over to Blue Note for the release of Squint in the summer of 2021, as Lage with steady assurance continued to trade between albums of standards or songs which sounded like standards – at times almost like amalgamations of standards or proto-standards, rich with their own atmosphere and folklore – and improvisational fare which in contemporary fashion sought a more tenuous pact between melody and texture.
To some extent the trio has remained the bulwark or key formal principle of his work, mixing as it does the restrained craft, close listening and classical airs of a chamber ensemble with the timbral possibilities and flexibility inherent in so much contemporary jazz. Lage also – at least as much as some of his influences and contemporaries, from his mentor Gary Burton to Bill Frisell who featured on View with a Room and its companion piece The Layers or to fellow guitarists like say Jakob Bro and Nels Cline – traces the shape and echoes the sound of some classic rock and folk trios, like the Kingston Trio or those early recordings by Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash at Sun.
After the wide vistas and engraved portraits of View with a Room and Layers his next record Speak to Me set the core trio of Lage, Roeder and King in a skronking and shimmering new context as they were joined variously by Patrick Warren on keyboard and strings, the exceptional Kris Davis on piano and Levon Henry on tenor saxophone and clarinets. Lage was therefore able to elaborate his partnership with Davis following on from Duopoly and Diatom Ribbons at the Village Vanguard while a fledgeling relationship with the celebrated producer Joe Henry encouraged more of a narrative or storytelling bent.
An album which revelled in the ‘deliberate crossing of wires’ between gospel hymnals and the rural blues, the thirteen songs of Speak to Me have been described as Lage’s ‘grand statement as an improvising bandleader capable of helming a relatively large ensemble through a diverse set of tunes’. Now on Scenes from Above the guitarist and bandleader has revamped his group by bringing Kenny Wollesen back into the fold and adding John Medeski, who plays piano and the Hammond B-3 organ. The quartet suggests a certain easy familiarity as well as Lage’s desire to explore gradations of texture and a new type of tone.
With a brisk two-day session at Sear Sound in bustling Manhattan already booked, Lage took an unceremonious approach to the composition of new material, setting a twenty-minute timer and capturing a quick recording before repeating the process. He soon wound up with around a hundred sketches which he and the producer Henry whittled down to a handful of songs that would serve as the supple spine of Scenes from Above.
Lage had been steeped in all kinds of folk material from American blues and proto-blues to early calypso songs and the Afro-Peruvian music of Susana Baca or the Hungarian Sketches and Romanian Folk Dances of BĆ©la BartĆ³k. All influenced his compositions but the idea was to bring snippets or anecdotes as a spur to further conversation rather than to arrive with a set of songs as ends-in-themselves.
A splatter of keys like splunking water droplets lead from ‘Opal’ on into ‘Red Elm’. Roeder’s rubbery bass introduces the piece and Medeski shimmers or conjures nebulous cloud formations as Lage takes a wiry and circuitous line which might call to mind the work of Mary Halvorson. In the final third he relaxes and breathes as his plaintive exhalations allow Medeski to gently transform the scene, with a fairground emerging in the clearing as ‘Red Elm’ sounds piquant and lambent and candied and sweet.
That sense of the fairground ride, waltzers and carousels always conjured by the Hammond B-3 organ and its rotating Leslie speaker, jives nicely on Scenes from AboveĀ with Lage’s propensity for helium or propane ascents like those hot air ballon rides which appear to be one of his core images. Then on the rollicking ‘Talking Drum’ the quartet share licks which sit at the intersection of gospel, soul and funk, a piece which finds the players revving their engines and sharing in crumpled or comic deflations before inevitably dusting themselves off and going again.
Always up for the grind, on ‘Havens’ it is Wollesen’s skittering or ricocheting double-time drums which set the pace as the organ opens up and swells as if to create a vortices or at least enough space for Lage to skate through with the flamenco inflections or calypso stylings of his acoustic guitar. Roeder is always there to lend deft support or lead phrases on the bass and Wollesen’s percussion carries the slapping tone of congas or other hand drums as the organ returns and surges again to lend a bronzed aspect to the dizzy climax of the piece.
‘Night Shade’ as the centrepiece of the album returns to the slower pace of ‘Opal’ but more languid, a lovely burnished sundown composition which opens through an easygoing guitar and subdued organ keys. Lage juxtaposes voice leading, that smooth development of the melodic line and the coming to fruition of resplendent harmonies, with a series of wriggly hammer-ons and pull-offs which not only add a certain dynamism to ‘Night Shade’ but carry real emotional heft as they jettison or disrupt the stately progression of the piece. It is as though the sky – not overcast but mottled through a covering of multihued clouds, pinkish and orangey – had opened right up and the sun released its first few tremulous beams.
Medeski on the Hammond organ follows up through a series of spiritual motifs. ‘Night Shade’ really showcases the strengths of the instrument and how it can lend to jazz not only the vestiges of a woozy Americana but a steep sense of living gospel music and some of those rippling sun-kissed landscapes redolent of the way out west. By the midpoint of this seven-minute piece – long by the trenchant standards of Scenes from Above – shrugging drums with their steady tread and Medeski’s swaggering organ bring the ensemble to a crest, but they settle right back down again at Lage’s behest for a porchside vision which threatens to slumber but basks instead in the glory of the scene.
The sun now veritably eats up the landscape as the quartet reach a high or fever pitch. ‘Night Shade’ delivers that prickly warmth which extends from the toes to the spine and is one of the hallmarks of aesthetic achievement. In fact Lage has had the song in the back of his locker for almost a decade, first writing it for Arclight in 2016 but always finding it too slow to properly coalesce. In this context with his latest ensemble ‘Night Shade’ truly stuns and is no doubt one of the best songs you’ll hear all year.
It must be said that if Medeski and the Hammond organ take a starring turn on Scenes from AboveĀ still Roeder has this symbiotic relationship with Lage which is both touching and at times profoundly gleeful while Wollesen is a presence of staggering calm and sensitivity behind the drum kit.
Kaleidoscopic organ washes and a tremulous glistening of guitar strings – whose overtones blend in effortlessly with Roeder’s sweetly murmuring bass – shape the opening of ‘Solid Air’ as a kind of Fata Morgana, belying its title. In fact the phrase is a nod to the John Martyn album of 1973, a milestone in the commingling of folk and blues and a kind of celestial psychedelia within what could be aptly described as a chamber jazz context. The singer-songwriter and guitarist Martyn was shadowed by Danny Thompson on the double bass, with Dave Pegg on the bass guitar and John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick across pianos, organ and the Clavinet, while Dave Mattacks played drums and Neemoi ‘Speedy’ Acquaye congas for a kind of doubling of the dynamics we might hear on Scenes from Above, as the cult favourite Solid Air also featured the talents of Sue Draheim, Richard Thompson and Tristan Fry on violin, mandolin and vibraphone.
Beyond the opening mirage – a glinting and shimmering wonder as the guitar and bass tumble and peak and the Hammond pulls apart like a prismatic accordion – ‘Solid Air’ slows right down to graze and takes in the breadth of its motley Arcadia. There are more sublimities from Medeski while Wollesen underpins the piece through his expansive and cascading cymbals. ‘Ocala’ is a jaunty breeze which summons dances from the tango to the waltz plus Hawaiian atmospheres not least through its suggestion of slack-key guitar while the standout ‘Storyville’ sparkles with a late-night flavour of revelry and ribaldry.
The ensemble almost joust as Lage makes chivalric gestures from the bass strings of his guitar and the keys dissolve around him, while Wollesen traces the tinny rustle of chainmail or shields and armour spinning in place on the floor until Roeder gallops in to add a sense of urgency and momentum. Soon enough they are riding three or four abreast, the percussion dashing to keep up with the bass as Lage’s choppy chords seem to compel a response from Medeski, who makes his Hammond and piano twine to gnarly effect before a brief restatement of the head and a last shugging dissolution.
That sense of riding together whether in tandem or abreast, enjoying the fun as well as the challenge of each other’s company, defines so much of Scenes from Above and through this dynamic rendering leads us into the album closer. ‘Something More’ lets go of the tempo rubato and some of those frictional textures, finding the bandleader Lage at his most euphonious. This is resonant music, a song that sounds both pleasantly timeworn yet utterly of the moment. Medeski lays down a brief introduction through the gospel stirrings of his piano and Lage through a downward arc begins to languor and to savour.
The harmonies of ‘Something More’ are so burnished and warm. The martial snare of Wollesen’s drum pattern turns to gentler ends as the quartet reach the first of several crescendos. The song is smooth and sun-ribboned with more of that melodic voice leading, though the softness hardly gives lie to the great variety and mastery which Lage has over his instrument, from plangent strums that bloom with the breadth and heft of a National resonator guitar to noodling passages and his distinctive use of palm muting which gives a dampened, dappled or freckled and percussive aspect to his playing as he works with guile and dexterity up and down the frets.
After a charming and captivating solo turn, buoyed in its latter stages by Roeder on the bass, Lage slides back in with the rest of his quartet and is rejoined by Wollesen’s blue-eyed soul backing and by Medeski’s heavenly or golden-hued accents. They surge and stir together one last time on ‘Something More’, at once a climax and a magic trick, shaking at the carpet from all four corners and pulling that rug before finally settling down to rest.
