Julian Lage discusses the influences of Bill Frisell, John Zorn, spirituality and the vintage instruments…
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Frisell and Lage first played to an audience before a class at the Stanford Jazz Workshop. “It was a standard song, and it was effortless,” Frisell recalls. They again performed standards at several tributes to Jim Hall, a mutual mentor. In 2015, Frisell invited Lage — at 28, already a well-established bandleader with a half-dozen recordings to his name — to play a full evening of duos during a week’s run at The Stone, John Zorn’s performance space. Two years later, Lage reciprocated during his own week at The Stone. Not long thereafter, Lage and Frisell began to tour the duo.
By this time, Zorn — who has famously enfolded Frisell into his projects since the mid-1980s — was consequentially documenting Lage on his label, Tzadik. First he paired him with Gyan Riley on the two-acoustic-guitar albums Bagatelles, Midsummer Moons and The Book Beri’ah Vol. 4: Chesed. “Then John wrote something that very evidently required a third voice,” Lage recalls. That voice was Frisell’s, and the duo became a trio, with Frisell functioning within Zorn’s technically gnarly, rigorously composed pieces as, in his words, “an orchestrator or colorist” on Nove Cantici Per Francesco D’Assisi (2019), Virtue (2020), Teresa de Avila (2020), Parables (2020), and A Garden of Forking Paths (2021). In 2017, Zorn paired Lage with avant-metal guitarist Matt Hollenberg on Insurrection and Salem, 1692, prodding him further into realms of skronky edginess and sonic exploration that Lage first showcased publicly on two mid-’10s collaborations with Nels Cline. He projects similar expansiveness on New Masada Quartet (2021), on which Zorn plays alto saxophone on a fresh suite of across-the-genre-spectrum music with Lage, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wolleson.
“Julian can play stuff that has never been humanly played on the instrument,” Frisell said. “Things I can’t comprehend. He’s taken musical ideas — contrapuntal or polytonal or harmonic things — and found ways of putting them on the guitar where it’s like, ‘What just happened there?’ But in my experience of playing with him, it’s never a showoff thing. It’s all done in the service of what the music in the moment is calling for. When we do those duos, there’s a joy factor. We get in this zone of heading out into territory where neither of us knows where it’s going to go. In those moments, I’m not thinking, ‘Wow, he just played something that’s impossible.’ It’s more like, ‘Wow, we just reached this new place.’
“I’ve most experienced that sort of technical astonishment when I’ve seen Julian play alone. On one of these three-guitar albums, John asked him to play an introduction that would lead us into a particular piece. Julian took musical material from the piece, and it was like, whoa.”
Lage describes Zorn’s three-guitar music as a “continuation” of his chamber music, specifically String Quartets #1 and #2 for the JACK Quartet (“some of the greatest string writing — highest level”). “It’s three lines intertwining,” Lage says. “Often it’s two guitars forming one texture and a third adding something, and then it switches. Speaking as a guitarist, when there are two players, each player is 100 percent of the equation; that’s a 200 percent all-hands-on-deck quality. When you go to three, often everyone gets neutered a bit, because you have to leave room. You’re not as free as a duo and not as big as an orchestra, so it can be an awkward number for guitars. John somehow doesn’t make it awkward. We’re each featured as improvisers, playing beautiful, complex melodic phrases. It’s a unique synthesis. John never obscures the integrity of the player’s voice. You don’t become anonymous with John’s music. You become more of yourself.
“John teaches me all the time that there’s something to be said for being pushed to your limits. That can elicit really great music — and it doesn’t mean you’re being gratuitous. Sometimes a risk factor enters the picture when I’m going for something challenging that maybe I once would have thought was immodest. Now I love it when it sounds like I’m about to fall off the cliff, and I can only get to the edge of the cliff if I push my capacity.”
Lage discusses Zorn’s impact on the compositions he wrote for View With a Room during the six months preceding the January 2022 recording date. “I look to Bill and John as compositional heroes,” he says. “One thing they do — which I’ve always been fond of and do myself — is to write everything by hand, pen and paper. When Zorn calls you for a record, you get every piece of sheet music for every song. It’s in sequence. It tells you the length. It tells you the tempo. You can hear it by looking at the sheets. I’ve interpreted that strategy with my own music. The band gets that stack of paper. It’s in order, all handwritten and clear.
“Structurally speaking, John is one of the world’s most imaginative composers. In addition to everything else, I’ve always tried to steal that part of it, so that every time you attack the piece it brings something out of the player. His writing always has a clear rhythmic spine that drives the whole thing, what I would call a clave, whether it’s centered around a 9/8 ostinato, or it’s just a 7, or it’s about a fast swing thing or a slow backbeat groove. John makes the rhythm and time — the tempo — integral to the music. On View With a Room, I was very clear that every song has its own clave. Even if multiple tunes share a beat, so to speak, or a groove, it’s not referencing the same source. On the trio tunes, ‘Heart Is a Drum’ is reminiscent of Now He Sings, Now He Sobs — the Roy Haynes swing feel. ‘Word for Word’ is more of a Mingus 3/4. ‘Castle Park’ is almost a Warne Marsh style medium 4/4 thing. All of them swing, but very distinguished. That’s a trait of Zorn’s that he’s impressed upon me, whether he knows it or not.”
At the end of our first conversation, I mention to Lage that Zorn’s application of spiritually themed titles to the guitar trio albums with Frisell and Riley. I observe that to investigate spirituality through the medium of notes and tones is the imperative that animates Charles Lloyd. (Lage first shared a bandstand with Lloyd at 12, has performed several concerts in Lloyd’s group in recent years, and plays with preternatural grace and fluidity on Lloyd’s November Blue Note release Trios: Sacred Thread with percussionist Zakir Hussain.) Does this quality apply to his own musical production?
“Their transmission of humanity is probably what I’m most attracted to about these artists,” Lage says. “At the core of all the music I love is transcendence, lifting a vibration that makes an impact and affects us spiritually and emotionally. The music Zorn and Charles write and play induces that kind of transcendence. That style of playing is cathartic. It’s a release. It’s risky. It gets the players on the edge of their seat, and a player on the edge of their seat can get into some special places.”
He segues to a phone call he made to Sonny Rollins “at the height of COVID,” when he asked the maestro: “Do you feel spirituality and music are the same thing? Is your path to music the same as your spiritual path?” Rollins responded: “They’re not the same thing, but they share a similar stage. Your spiritual development and your music development can work together. At the end of the day, you just really have to be a good guy.”
“It was so beautiful, it almost made me want to cry,” Lage says. “I felt him offering a different paradigm than I was looking at it through. I was struggling to fuse humanity and music together, and he gave me permission just to try to be a good guy and make music that you like. Don’t complicate it. This hearkens back to what I was saying about Bill. I’ve been so blessed to be around these figures who at very important times say, ‘You’re fine, you’re cool, you’re not missing something — you’re OK.’ I feel that’s true of all of us. My aim is to continue down that path, wherever it takes us, and keep that door wide open so that the music can have as much impact as possible on a spiritual level and on a human level. Just for myself.” - Ted Panken https://open.spotify.com/album/0bxXAO9Vxpx20fidIJc4va?si=B6aKwHUdSY2k-jQZWYMoWQ