If there are any sceptics out there who doubt that a jazz guitar track can’t be an ear worm should press play on the official video for Julian Lage’s Northern Shuffle, which has been shared today on his YouTube channel.
Taken from his bravura 2024 studio album, Speak To Me, and performed live with Lage leading his six-piece band, an audience seated at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco to bear witness to it, Northern Shuffle has this ambulatory electric guitar riff with a groove that all but hijacks your consciousness.
Northern Shuffle should come with a warning that it’ll be in both head and body for days, and it’s a track that remarkably started out as a solo study for guitar before becoming lead instrument in a full six-piece ensemble.
Speaking to MusicRadar in March, Lage said Northern Shuffle evolved of an long-held obsession with the history of the shuffle, how it was articulated on drums and in on guitar
“Shuffles sound different played by different people,” said Lage. “I think the shuffles I am most obsessed with are what you hear with T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. Dun-dah-dun-dah / dun-dah-dun… Whatever that is – and it is different for everybody – it is no way shape or form meant as trying to replicate [something] but finding your own personal shuffle because people feel that very idiosyncratically.”
Throughout the writing process for Speak To Me, which took place while Lage was on tour with his trio, one of the through lines was that they needed a groove. In Northern Shuffle, Lage soon found one.
“I wish you could hear the original because it is really a solo guitar piece, and it is a study,” he said. “There are kind of two songs happening at once. There’s the shuffle and then, in a way, this irrational melody that has its own tempo. It’s almost a Paul Motian melody. That’s how I thought of it.”
That was in March. Just last week, in lieu of this video dropping, Lage did share a video of Northern Shuffle on solo guitar, all performed on his Collings acoustic guitar, footage that serves to highlight just how physical it is to wrangle these sounds from the instrument.
The full-band performance, released today, finds Lage backed by his regular trio collaborators Dave King on drums and Jorge Roeder on double bass, plus Levon Henry on tenor sax, Patrick Warren on keys, and Kris Davis on piano.
Lage plays his Nachocaster throughout. On the record, however, it was a vintage Epiphone Coronet that he borrowed for the session that we’re hearing.
Tuned to C standard, played in E, Lage says he was “lost” trying to get to grips with an unfamiliar guitar in an unfamiliar tuning, which when you consider how tricksy that rhythm part is, feels like an appropriate choice of instrument on a track that Lage says is the “physical heartbeat” of the record.
It’s a little bit of rubbing your stomach and patting your head, where you go between the shuffle and the free melody shuffle
“It’s a little bit of rubbing your stomach and patting your head, where you go between the shuffle and the free melody shuffle, and then at the V chord they converge for the grand finale. Yeah, I’d say that tune represents the rhythmic and kind of physical heartbeat of the record, and developed from this three-way fascination. Then you bring in the full band and it just sort of erupts.”
Check it out above, both with full band and on solo acoustic. Speak To Me is out now on Blue Note. Lage tours the US with Leo Kottke this month before picking up the Speak To Me Tour in September. See Julian Lage for tickets and details.
