Speak To Me is unmistakably a Julian Lage record. There is the juxtaposition between the considered and the instinctual, the tension between the melodic and atonal. There is that live-wire audacity in his electric guitar, and moments of stillness, intimacies shared via an OM-sized acoustic, all to tell us a story. And yet Speak To Me is quite unlike anything Lage has done before.
His fourth studio album for Blue Note, Speak To Me expands Lage’s usual trio to a sextet, changing the dimensions of the songwriting, finding Lage’s jazz guitar touring through adjacent musical neighbourhoods, drawing from gospel, hymnals, acoustic folk, the blues, with the acoustic sharing more of the burden than we are used to hearing, his 1657 Nachocaster T-type with the Ellisonic P-90 at the neck shouldering most of the electric work.
