Catching Up with Julian Lage

Julian Lage literally grew up on Bay Area stages.

From the age of five, the Santa Rosa-raised guitarist cut an irresistible, diminutive figure, playing with the poise, technique and preternatural maturity of a musician many times his age. He was such a conspicuously gifted player that a 1996 documentary, Jules at Eight, made the rounds at film festivals.

But rather than becoming a cautionary example of the pitfalls often associated with young, prodigious talent, Lage took time to let music — and life — take its own course.

Now 36, Lage has more than lived up to his promise, creating a vast body of music as a bandleader, composer and collaborator with some of contemporary music’s most celebrated artists. Those include fellow guitarists like Bill Frisell and Nels Cline, as well as vibraphonist Gary Burton, tenor sax star Charles Lloyd and altoist/composer John Zorn.

Lage’s first stint as an SFJAZZ resident artistic director brings him back to the Bay Area from his home in New York City for a four-night run at SFJAZZ on Jan. 18–21, offering a intimate look at where he’s been lately.

“It’s an opportunity to do something so dear to your heart, or things that don’t get much attention,” he said on a recent phone call with his wife, the singer, songwriter and guitarist Margaret Glaspy. “It’s so cool and such a privilege. We have this January run and we’re back in early 2025. I think of this one as establishing a foundation, and the intent is for next year’s to be more experimental.”

There’s nothing more foundational than an artist alone on stage with a guitar, and Lage opens the run Thursday with a solo recital focusing on material from his 2015 album World’s Fair, an acoustic straight-to-tape session he recorded on a 1939 Martin 000-18. Aside from the Richard Rodgers standard “Where Or When” and Gary Harrison’s old-time fiddle tune “Red Prairie Dawn,” the pieces are all originals — “almost songs without lyrics,” Lage said.

“It’s one acoustic guitar, one mic, austere,” Lage said. He’d just finished a two-week tour of solo performances, and found himself “approaching the concerts like [pianist] Paul Bley playing solo, slipping into a standard and an original, playing a free piece, so you hear how one instrument evolves over the course of an evening.”

Friday offers the frisson of a Bay Area premiere: Lage and Glaspy perform together here for the first time in Rude Ruth, a project that resets her songs in the context of his long-running trio with bassist Jorge Roeder and The Bad Plus drummer Dave King.

Glaspy has been a regular presence on Bay Area stages over the past 10 years, most recently last November at The Independent on a tour for her third studio album Echo the Diamond. For audiences well-acquainted with Lage, who’ve watched his rise since grade school, there’s something wondrous about getting this glimpse into his private creative life.

He and Glaspy met at Berklee, and playing music together “was always the basis of our connection,” he said. She’s produced several of his albums, including his upcoming debut on Blue Note, Squint, a song-centric project with the trio slated for release in June.

Glaspy’s own projects tend toward the raw and dramatic, while Rude Ruth offers a lyrical setting with quieter dynamics. Another difference is that Glaspy leaves the guitar work to Lage, “so I’m free to be a singer and be in the very capable hands of Julian, which opens up a lot of doors for me as a vocalist,” she said. “In the writing process, I can dive in as a lyricist in a narrative way. For my solo work I’m often from first person, my own stories. Rude Ruth tells bigger narratives. Each one is a short story.”

Lage is also premiering a new set of music from an upcoming album Speak to Me, a septet with Roeder, King, pianist Kris Davis, saxophonist Levon Henry, and keyboardist Patrick Warren. In the studio, he worked closely with veteran Los Angeles producer Joe Henry, who helped fill out the instrumental palette of “a record of spirituals and gospel, a project where the concept was to make a body of music as a form of devotion,” Lage said.

While Sunday’s closing show is billed as a tribute to the late guitar legend Jim Hall, Lage says that’s not exactly accurate. Rather, he’s assembling a group of musicians similarly swayed by Hall’s profound yet puckish sensibility, “playing songs he loved to play, some originals, some not,” Lage said. Featuring saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Joey Baron, who all performed and recorded with Hall, the group is less interested in repertoire than the close-listening chamber jazz aesthetic that Hall cultivated.

“More than anything it’s a disposition that’s rife with humor, that’s satirical and idiosyncratic,” Lage said. “That’s what Jim responded to. He was about progression.”

In following his multifarious muses, Lage is providing a similarly capacious road map for pursuing a creative life.

Julian Lage performs across four nights, Jan. 18–21, at SFJAZZ in San Francisco. Friday night’s concert will be livestreamed, then available on demand as of Jan. 26. Details here.