Julian Lage Quartet

Hailed as one of the most prodigious guitarists of his generation and “highest category of improvising musicians” (New Yorker), Julian Lage has spent more than a decade searching through the myriad strains of American musical history via impeccable technique, free association and a spirit of infinite possibility.

In the waning days of 2024, Lage began what he calls a writing sprint. Lage has long been prolific: In the three decades since the documentary Jules at Eight identified him as a prodigy, Lage has made a dozen records with his own bands and duos, and three times that many with leading lights of his artistic orbit, like John Zorn, Gary Burton, and Charles Lloyd. But Lage was preparing for a four-day residency at SFJAZZ, plus the premiere of a new quartet of old collaborators and friends who had strangely never recorded together: Lage with steadfast bassist Jorge Roeder, dynamic drummer Kenny Wollesen, and vaunted keyboardist John Medeski. As he thought about their qualities as players and hypothesized about how they might interact, he set a timer for 20 minutes, wrote a tune, recorded it once, and then began again.

Lage called one particular tune he loved during that sprint, “Storyville.” It’s quick, flickering riff felt like an invitation for conversation, exactly the kind of thing he hopes to find in such a sprint. “My dream with composing, really, is to have something to talk about once we’re together,” he says. “It’s not the end-all, be-all.” Hearing what the quartet created with the piece in the studio is like watching a pot of water boil and observing not the chaos but the order, the way every molecule is pushing against the other with purpose.

That is the spirit of Scenes from Above, Lage’s second full-length album with the producer Joe Henry and his first with this striking quartet. Where 2024’s Speak to Me was Lage’s grand statement as an improvising bandleader capable of helming a relatively large ensemble through a diverse set of tunes, Scenes from Above is about being a band member himself, about Lage exploring the tunes he has written with a crew he has built with that entirely in mind. Its nine tracks frame a brilliantly open experience, with four astounding players giving and taking space in equal measure as they explore these songs in one space, in real time.