Somewhere in John Cheever’s letters or maybe in his diaries or maybe just in his conversation, he remarked that writing was not a competitive sport. No other art is, either, and so I am not sure how to describe a night in January of 2020 when I heard the guitarist Julian Lage at the Village Vanguard with his trio, which includes Jorge Roeder on bass and Dave King on drums. I wanted to say it was the best night of music I had ever been present for, which is what I left the Vanguard thinking; then I remembered Cheever. Nevertheless, the texture of that night—its coherence, its moments of exhilaration and subtle audacity, its surprising juxtapositions and its episodes of transcendent engagement—has returned many times to my mind. I have wished that someone had made a recording of it, but so far as I know no one did.
It goes without saying, of course, that, while I remember the crowd at the Vanguard being very appreciative, not everyone probably felt like I did. There are elements to my impressions, just as there are elements to all sensory experiences, and all of them are subjective, of course, however much we might privately wish that they represented standards. At eight years old, I was imprinted on the electric guitar by the Beatles and by the Ventures. The Ventures came first, specifically “Walk, Don’t Run,” which I heard on the radio in my parents’ car. I used to draw electric guitars in the margins of my schoolbooks, and in art class I would make little ones out of cardboard, like dollhouse pieces, and color them, always in red. The forms seemed to me, and still do, obscurely erotic. I didn’t know that at the time; I only felt it. They suggested a larger version of life than the one I knew, which included wearing a baggy red blazer to play trumpet in the school orchestra. The electric guitar is the only brass, woodwind, or stringed instrument I can think of that was designed in the modern era. The shape of a Fender Telecaster or a Stratocaster or a Guild Starfire or a Gibson SG or a Les Paul or a Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman, which George Harrison played on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” or the black Rickenbacker 325 that John Lennon played, didn’t exist until after the Second World War. Their design is from the period when car designers were putting big fins on Cadillacs and Lincolns, and when science fiction was popular and people were thinking about rocket ships and a future where robots did everything for you, as in “The Jetsons.”
I raise this to say that I am inclined toward favoring performances on guitar over performances on other instruments. This means that when I listen to guitar players I hear things that less obsessively engaged ears might not hear, and also that I miss things in the performances of musicians on other instruments that more sophisticated ears than my own can hear. I wish this weren’t true, but I know that it is. The older I get, the harder I try to overcome it, because the world does not present enough opportunities for deep engagement and joy, and I wish to have as many as I can.
The Vanguard is an intimate place, and to me one of the thousand and one cool things about New York City. It is in a basement on Seventh Avenue South. Coltrane played there, and Thelonious Monk—their photographs are on the wall—and so did Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Lage’s mentor, the guitarist Jim Hall, who lived nearby. No seat is far from the stage, but for Lage’s performance I happened to be occupying a chair at a table that was only a few feet from Dave King, the drummer, so I was hearing what the musicians were hearing as they were hearing it. The music seemed to be coming directly from their hands and minds. Lage stood beside King, and Roeder, the bass player, stood on the other side of Lage.
It was the first time I became acquainted closely with the sweep and reach of Lage’s intelligence. It’s apparent, of course, in his music—no one could play as he does without having a mind to corral it all—but he has a lot of candlepower to call on, and it was compelling to see it invoked intimately. I felt as if he and his cohorts were writing sentences with an alphabet of notes, if that’s not too pointed.
Lage is thirty-three. He is a little above medium height and a bit lanky. He has a long, narrow face and a high forehead, and when he doesn’t shave he looks like a less sober-minded Abraham Lincoln. His manner is unassuming and serene, but also alert. There is a film about him as a child, titled “Jules at Eight,” made in 1996 by Mark Becker, in which Lage plays a Stratocaster that appears to be about as tall as he is, and he says that he has been playing guitar every day since he was five, except for one day when he had to take a train trip and couldn’t bring the guitar; “I really regret that day,” he says plaintively. By eight, he had played onstage with Carlos Santana, and by eleven he had recorded with the mandolin virtuoso David Grisman. Like Kurt Rosenwinkel, John Mayer, and David Rawlings, he went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, which is a kind of hothouse origin place for brainy, technically adept musicians, a small portion of whom rise to the level of these four. Among Lage’s practice routines is improvising to the rhythms of famous speeches, mostly ones by James Baldwin. He put his trio together about three years ago.
Radiance is a quality I associate with Lage, in his playing and in his temperament. I think this quality is on display in a performance video where he appears with his wife, the songwriter Margaret Glaspy, who is singing her song “Parental Guidance.” Somewhere in the middle of Lage’s solo, he seems to surprise himself, as if delighted by something he just heard. I don’t think he’s being coy, and I don’t think it’s a show-business gesture—that is, I don’t think it’s a rehearsed solo that includes his making that gesture, because I have seen other versions of the song, and he doesn’t play the same solo or respond in anything like the same way. It appears to be a revelation unfolding in real time—a genuine portrayal of an interior state. Music, of course, has the capacity to provoke unexpected responses, and it seems that, to the degree we are alive to it, we are alive to something sustaining and mysterious within ourselves.
I didn’t know any of the material that Lage played at the Vanguard, but I do now, because he has released an album called “Squint,” which includes many of the songs from the set I heard. All but two of the songs he wrote.
The songs mostly follow one another immediately, as if they were continuous thoughts or parts of a song cycle. The album begins with a solo piece called “Etude,” which consists of a series of water-like figures, eight sections of theme and variation before Lage restates the original theme. It is followed by “Boo’s Blues,” an homage to a style and a period. Next is “Squint,” an angular rumination in which a phrase begins in one register and ends in another, and the rises and descents are sometimes startling for their reach. It put me in mind of those dancers who stumble and fall, and right themselves just before hitting the floor.
“Squint” leads into “Saint Rose,” which is built around a series of rising intervals stacked on one another. Lage’s tone is clear and ringing and a little hard. Zen surf music is what it sounds like to me. “Familiar Flower” has a metrically complex melody. Lage seems to have set himself a problem of timing that it isn’t possible to resolve, but he steps suddenly free of his restraints at the end of each phrase. “Quiet Like a Fuse” has a haunting modal and elegiac feel. It is slightly mournful, but also determined and quietly intent.
There are a few more songs, including two covers: “Emily,” a ballad by Johnny Mandel and Johnny Mercer, from the movie “The Americanization of Emily,” which came out in 1964; and “Call of the Canyon,” which Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, sang in the movie “Melody Ranch,” in 1940, but you get the picture. If I close my eyes, I can listen to the album and return partly to the night at the Vanguard, even though, as with all memories, we are never the person we were when the memory was formed. I still like it very much, though.
