Julian Lage Trio

On Modern Lore, Julian Lage‘s second studio recording with his trio, the composer and guitarist focuses on the groove, building his melodies and solos around prodigious rhythm section accompaniment. Modern Lore finds Lage playfully flipping the script he followed on his acclaimed 2016 Mack Avenue debut, Arclight. That album — produced, like Modern Lore, by Lage’s friend and collaborator, the singer-songwriter Jesse Harris — was his first trio set on electric guitar and found Lage inspired by the sounds and the attitude of the freewheeling, pre-bebop jazz era, when, as he puts it, “country music and jazz and swing were in this weird wild-west period.” This time he incorporates the sensibility, if not the outright sound, of early rock and roll, a similarly hybrid form driven by rhythm, personality and a passion for the electric guitar. Lage’s Trio features bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Eric Doob.