I was excited by what I had heard of this quartet – guitarist Julian Lage, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wollesen – on their album Scenes from Above, which came out in January; I thought it was Lage’s strongest album in eight years.
Their concert in front of a full-ish and highly appreciative Royal Festival Hall audience on Friday night absolutely fulfilled the best expectations. But perhaps above all I am excited by where this band can go over the next few years. Lage has had seven Grammy nominations until now, but never won one. Maybe that is about to be put right.
His quartet has a fascinating cast of characters. Start with the leader. He is never ashamed to conjure an utterly beautiful sound from his Epiphone, that is a given, it’s in his nature. And yet one can sense he is always striving to make it even better. On Friday he kept communicating instructions (incomprehensible to the rest of us but always with a smile) to his stalwart sound engineer Mark Goodell.
Rather than unleashing the band straight away, Lage often leads off alone, starts to tell a solo story. And the truth is that he is eminently capable of creating many different forms of magic or flow on his own, whether its elaborate Bach-ian counterpoint, or a hint of Wes Montgomery, or just a slow and steady Ry Cooder-ish pulse. I would recommend a recently posted video on YouTube of an entire solo concert (“Live in Bristol”). It shows how wonderfully he does that, it serves as reminder of his remarkable completeness as a musician.
And yet that’s only a small part of the story of this gig and of this remarkable band. It was fascinating to hear how this quartet works in a spirit of complete empathy to create and build intensity and heft, always to be moving towards a different mood or vibe. Having heard groups led by Lage in much smaller spaces (the Vortex in 2011 and Pizza Express in 2018 in particular stay vividly in the mind) it was a joy to hear the group creating an experience which absolutely worked in a hall seating 2,700 people.
Bassist Jorge Roeder and Lage know each other’s playing inside out and their telepathic understanding is a joy to watch and hear. Roeder has shown on his remarkable solo bass album El Suelo Mio (2020) what a soulful and eloquent solo player he is. Here, his way of reinforcing the sound of the band, of placing and landing the harmonic rhythm is unbeatable and infallible every time.
Drummer Kenny Wolleson, with a deep knowledge and awareness of volume and balance and texture, is a marvel. A new-ish tune, “Aberdeen” has him providing boundless energy, drive and shimmering cymbals. “Talking Drum”, released as the first single on the album, came in late in the set, and it validates his joyfully communicative role in the quartet, and felt like one of those joyful moments when an ideal has been achieved.
Lage has described the band as a situation in which each of the members “goes and builds this beautiful tension.” The member of the band given the most chance to shine, to disrupt, to go counter to the flow in the live situation is the remarkable John Medeski, who got to know Lage in their work on the John Zorn Bagatelles project. The sheer range of timbres Medeski was finding in the Hammond on Friday night was remarkable, but he is also clearly encouraged to provide acts of outright rebellion, notably in a piano feature with an endless supply of violent and barbed cluster chords called “Borrowed Light”.
This supergroup, surely, has plenty of mileage left in it to discover, explore and develop, and to become one of the essential groups in the world. Here’s hoping that happens.
