Virtuoso guitarist Julian Lage has announced his latest album View With a Room, featuring his familiar trio along with the additionally formidable guitar talents of Bill Frisell.
Lage is joined by bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King along with Frisell as a special guest, opening up Lage’s compositional possibilities throughout these 10 original tunes.
View With a Room is the 12th album by Julian Lage. It’s a swift follow-up to his Blue Note debut Squint, released in 2021.
Watch the official video for the lead single Auditorium below.
“In so many ways, I’ve wanted to make this record for years,” says Lage. “It comes from a line of musical inquiry: Can you have lush orchestration combined with an organic sense of improvisation and the agility of a small ensemble?”
With Frisell, Lage found his solution.
“The answer came from some of the historical references that matter to me about the electric guitar,” Lage explains. “There’s a certain lineage that grows out of early pioneers like Jimmy Bryant and George Barnes and Charlie Christian, where there’s this almost electric volatility to the sound. It’s both beautiful and kind of sharp; it’s subdued and warm, but also kind of gritty. In thinking about the orchestration for this album, I wanted to foster the point of that arrow.”
Lage needn’t look much further than Bill Frisell, who has become well-known and highly regarded for his mastery of the guitar and prolific music career spanning more than 40 years. The legendary guitarist has previously worked with Lage in several different contexts over the years, including duo concerts and projects devised by John Zorn.
Together, the two guitarists drew on a well of influences as diverse as the Beach Boys, Keith Jarrett’s American and European Quartets, and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.
“There’s no one I would trust more than Bill Frisell to come into our trio ecosystem and be able to expand it while totally embracing it,” Lage says. “It became a beautiful collaboration that achieved the Technicolor experience that I’ve been searching for.”
View With a Room was produced by Margaret Glaspy, Lage’s wife and musical partner. She worked closely with engineer Mark Goodell at Brooklyn’s Bridge Studios, and Lage’s longtime friend and collaborator Armand Hirsch added integral post-production elements.
Here’s the track listing for View With a Room:
- Tributary
- Word for Word
- Auditorium
- Heart is a Drum
- Echo
- Chavez
- Temple Steps
- Castle Park
- Let Every Room Sing
- Fairbanks
Julian Lage’s View With a Room will be released Sept. 16, 2022, via Blue Note.
