An Evening with Julian Lage Quartet featuring John Medeski, Jorge Roeder, Kenny Wollesen

105.5 The Colorado Sound Presents An Evening with Julian Lage Quartet featuring John Medeski, Jorge Roeder, Kenny Wollesen

In the waning days of 2024, Julian 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.

Scenes from Above radiates both qualities in tandem. Opener “Opal” is a gorgeous invocation, Lage’s thoughtful and patient lead unfurling beneath a rhythmic bed so rich and supportive it feels like cultivated terra firma. Wollesen and Roeder gallop slowly and steadily as Medeski and Lage exchange thoughts, subtle shifts in the organ’s hum and glow prompting the guitarist to move in unexpected directions. The quartet sizzles during “Talking Drum,” Medeski stabs his organ between the beat until he lifts up to ride alongside Lage and, as it were, discuss the melody. There is, as Lage had hoped, plenty to talk about. It is as close as Scenes from Above gets to groove and jam, but there is a gleeful resistance to it, too, of never sitting still with a solo or rhythm. They get into the idea and get out, too excited by what may still happen to belabor anything they’ve already found.

In spite of the caliber of players on Scenes from Above, the tracks hover around the four-minute mark, the result of the restraint they felt in a studio where they could play quietly and still be heard. The exception, though, is “Night Shade,” the album’s exquisite seven-minute centerpiece, suffused with a Medeski organ run that feels like gospel gold and a series of Lage solos that suggest brilliantly gestural blues. But is it really an exception? Listen again and notice the many instances in which the music crests like a wave, about to crack open into something that resembles chaos. But they hold steady there both times, both to be heard and to hear others. That is what makes Scenes from Above so poignant and timely — four dazzling instrumentalists in a room, talking to one another but never actually over one another.