Julian Lage will issue a new album, View With A Room, featuring renowned guitarist Bill Frisell on September 16 via Blue Note Records. Lage previewed the LP with the single “Auditorium.”
Along featuring Frisell, View With A Room contains contributions from Lage’s longtime rhythm section of bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King. Julian enlisted his wife and singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy to produce View With A Room. Along with post-production elements from longtime Lage collaborator and friend Armand Hirsch, Glaspy worked at Brooklyn’s Bridge Studios with engineer Mark Goodell, who Lage credits with “wrangling this album into a sonic place that references what we love best about classic Blue Note records while still feeling utterly contemporary and unique to the sound of this band.”
Lage further detailed View With A Room:
“In so many ways, I’ve wanted to make this record for years. 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?
The answer came from some of the historical references that matter to me about the electric guitar. 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.
Julian also spoke about frequent collaborator Bill Frisell, who he has worked with on previous projects. “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,” he said. “It became a beautiful collaboration that achieved the Technicolor experience that I’ve been searching for.”
Lage and his rhythm section’s chemistry with Frisell is at the forefront of lead single, “Auditorium,” “where Frisell’s agile rhythm work buoys Lage’s eloquent leads atop the gracefully subtle propulsion of Roeder and King,” press materials for the album noted.
Listen to the studio version of “Auditorium” with Frisell below and also check out a live performance video featuring the Julian Lage trio:
Julian Lage is touring around View With A Room this fall. The autumn run will see Lage throughout the U.S. kicking off on September 13 in Pittsburgh and concluding on December 14 in Charlottesville, Virginia. A pre-sale begins Wednesday, June 22 while general on-sales begin Friday, June 24 at 10 a.m. local venue time. Find ticket info and tour dates below:
