Love Hurts, Music Heals

Julian Lage is on his own today. In the largest of four practice spaces—and the only one with a proper soundstage—at a rehearsal facility near his Brooklyn home, the 31-year-old guitarist has come to woodshed a bit, a lone, lithe figure in an expansive room built to handle a full production rehearsal.

Perhaps the scale is fitting, metaphorically speaking. For the sheer scope of Lage’s artistic output over the last couple of decades on both acoustic and electric guitar, including collaborations with avant-garde svengali John Zorn, sonic anarchist and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Punch Brothers bluegrass badass Chris Eldridge, pianist Fred Hersch, and jazz-noir drummer Kenny Wollesen, would seem to defy any conventional boundaries of style. Even the term “virtuoso”—no less reductive than Lage’s previous public designation, “child prodigy”—seems too snug a fit for a player whose strengths derive as much from his restless imagination as from the presumptive lightning bolt that bestowed him with (more than) enough raw talent to make records with Gary Burton at age 11.

Or perhaps it’s simply the poetics of space itself—the acoustic kind, and also the creative headroom to open up new expression—that’s drawn Lage unaccompanied to this reverberant chamber on a spring afternoon. Space, after all, permeates both the ambient production quality and the musical dialogue between Lage, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer David King on Lage’s latest electric guitar album, (Mack Avenue). It’s the unseen fourth voice in a compelling 10-song cycle that continues Lage’s ongoing survey of the 20th-century American songbook, a reading he’s carried through from and 2018’s . Here Lage’s own compositions stride reflectively alongside the trio’s spirited takes on Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Giuffre, and Keith Jarrett, plus a solemn but streetwise run at Boudleaux Bryant’s chestnut of a title track (previously covered by Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Nazareth, Gram Parsons, and Joan Jett, among others).