Julian Lage is truly a guitarist like no other. He’s insanely creative, prolific, has unbelievable technical facility, but also plays with incredible taste, tone and restraint. He grew up around the bay area of California and was a child prodigy who started getting noticed when he was just a little tyke. There’s even a movie about him from that time called “Jules At Eight” (when he was eight!), and he played at the Grammys when he was 12, which is where Gary Burton, the incredible vibraphone player heard him, and asked him to join his band. Julian played with Burton for the better part of a decade, but also spent time playing and collaborating with John Zorn, Nels Cline, Dave Douglas, Charles Lloyd, as well as David Grisman and Chris Eldridge from over in the bluegrass world. He’s been releasing solo albums since 2009, and over the last year released a full-length album that is absolutley spectacular called “View With A Room”, and then some songs that were essentially out-takes from that album but took on a life of their own came out more recently, and that’s a beautiful new EP called “The Layers”. He has this incredible trio now that I think is one of the great American ensembles - Jorge Roeder is an incredible bassist and Dave King is the drummer, who some will know from the Bad Plus. Julian is an incredible talent, and very thoughtful human and musician and we had a great conversation about all these aspects of his career, nerded out on guitars, and got deep into music!

Keep up with what Julian is up to over at: julianlage.com

Be sure to listen to the Accompanying Songs Playlist which contains some of the artist’s work, plus many of the songs we discuss on the show:

Playlist on Spotify / Playlist on Apple Music

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The show’s website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com

Your fearless host, Steve Dawson can be found at www.stevedawson.ca

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