Julian Lage - Gladwell (2011)Who is Julian Lage?
Well, he's definitely one of the most underground artists I'll recommend on here in terms of name recognition, but the youngin' has already had a prestigious career as a jazz guitar virtuoso. You wanna name-drop, oh LET'S GO: David Grisman, Bela Fleck, Mark O'Connor, Chris Potter, Herbie Hancock, Antonio Sanchez...I'll stop there.
But who is he really? My impression is that he may be the nicest man on the planet. I had the pleasure of seeing him open for the Punch Brothers last year (Chris Thile's words as Lage and his band left the stage: "...definitely not an opening act."). The thing that I remember most distinctly his Lage's ceaseless smiling. And no, this wasn't some cool-guy-at-Chuck-E-Cheese smile, nor a tool-y CSI: Miami smile. This smile was pure, like a baby's ass. The man would rip out ridiculous licks at catastrophic speeds, and the whole time, he would just bob and smile. Occassionally he would do the jazzy "uhh yea" facial expression, but like, waaaay later than when the rest of the crowd started doing it in reaction to his solo. He won our embittered Punch Brothers hearts over in a jiffy. I just wrote juffy accidentally...a juffy is something much grosser, I think. Juffy juice? Enough.
Okay, so he's the virgin Mary incarnate. What sort of music does this anti-Ares play?
Jazz. But let's deconstruct that. Let's build up a spectrum of jazz. At one end we have pop-jazz. We'll place Jamie Cullum's album Twentysomething there (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFIjSY0amtc). At the other end, we've got, hmm, John Coltrane's Giant Steps (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30FTr6G53VU&feature=related), the pure, uncut raw stuff that Coltrane himself loved...him and Miles both. Sniff. See, most people like the Jamie Cullum end, but as we get more towards Giant Steps, we bleed people like Coltrane's saxophone bled notes. Enter Julian Lage, the marijuana of jazz. That's right, he is the perfect gateway drug into jazz; he helps you took those giant steps towards...oh, shut up, John. This is exactly what I like about Lage so much; he's a jazz musician steeped in the jazz tradition who hasn't forgot about songwriting. He's modernized jazz songwriting on his album. He flirts with nearly pop-like structures on certain songs, but he just happens to be doing brilliant jazz things in those structures.
You haven't convinced me. What artists does he sound like?
DANGLING PREPOSITION. Okay, that's out of my system. He sounds like John Scofield with the acid-techno aspects. He sounds like Brad Mehldau with more focus on songwriting (sorry Brad). He sounds good. Listen to him.
pw: crossgenre
PS to my one or two occasional readers / people I forced to read: sorry for being MIA. Finals week is a bitch, and wisdom teeth-removal is a bigger bitch. Hopefully I can stay on track now.
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