In A Town Called Gladwell
Article by Bill Milkowski for JAZZIZ MAGAZINE
Willoughby? Maybe it's wishful thinking nestled in a hidden part of a man's mind, or maybe it's the last stop in the vast design of things - or perhaps, for a man like Gart Williams, who climbed on a world that went by too fast, it's a place around the bend where he could jump off. Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity, and is a part of the twilight zone." - Rod Serling
In that famous episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "A Stop at Willoughby,"which originally aired in 1960, Rod Serling's main character, Gart Williams, is a stressed-out Wall Streeter buckling under the day-to-day pressures of the Rat Race. On his nightly rail commute back home to suburbia, he invariably falls asleep and in a lucid dream hears the conductor call out, "Next stop, Willoughby, " which is not a scheduled stop on the route home. One night Gart follows his curiosity and steps off the train, entering into the chaming 1870's-era town Willoughby, where brass bands eternally playin the gazebo while gentlemen ride by on high-wheeled bikes, kids wander around barefoot and all the townsfolk smile and bid pleasantries to one another as they pass by.
As a way of jumpstarting his second recording as a leader, guitarist-composer Julian Lage fashioned his own private Willoughby, a fictional place that exists only in his imagination, which he calls Gladwell. As the 23 year-old explains, "It started as a vision of my own that was really peripheral. I remember being in Boston, walking home from school. I was going to Berklee at the time, and every day I would walk through this beautiful park called the Emerald Necklace that was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also did Central Park. And I remember having these really distinct ideas at the time, thinking, 'This is a beautiful environment. What if you wrote a whole record of music that was essentially trying to capture a sense of a place like this, where each song was designed for a different geographic location?' And the more I began thinking, 'What if it's a town? And what if you job was to walk someone through this place and explain to them, 'Over there is the church, over there is where the people live, over there is the town square, over that's the tavern where you can hear music.'"
Lage's active daydreaming has finally manifested in Gladwell, his second album for the Emarcy imprint. Using the same unconventional instrumentation that he employed on his 2009 Grammy nominated debut, Sounding Point, Lage and his genre-bending crew conjure up a distinct sense of place on this evocative outing. And like Gart Williams visiting Willoughby in The Twilight Zone or the stage manager in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town detailing the events of fictional Grover's Corners, Lage acts as a tour guide through the imaginary town of Gladwell, using musical vignettes as his mode of storytelling. As he writes in the CD's liner notes: "With its small population and slight size, Gladwell is marked by a handful of unique characteristics. At the entrance to the town, you would encounter a diverse mixture of people and influences. You would witness the way people lived, as well as how they spent their time. You might venture into an area of town filled with small markets and bazaars, or take a walk past the town's sacred meeting place, located in the heart of the town square."
Lage and his current band - Aristides Rivas on cello, Jorge Roeder on acoustic bass, Tupac Mantilla on drums and precussion, Dan Blake on tenor sax and melodica - began working on this project last October, shortly after the Bay Area native had moved to New York City. And while he landed in a nice spot on Manhattan's Upper West Side, just steps away from Frederick Law Olmsted's central park, itself a kind of retreat for stressed New Yorkers, he sees how the creation of his Gladwell might be construed as an antidote to big city life. Indeed while New York City has been portrayed in musical terms by the sounds of hustle and bustle and grandiosity (think Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue") or represented by the aggressively swinging sounds of bebop, the sound of Gladwell is quaint and bucolic by comparison, particularly on pieces like the elegant "Margaret," which is gently underscored by Mantilla's fingers on the drumheads and cymbals, and the melancholy heartland number "Cocoon." And the closing number, "Telegram," fueled by Mantilla's brisk playing on a cajon - a box-shaped percussion instrument generally associated with flamenco music - is more bluegrass breakdown than bebop burner.
"This idea of taking the audience on a tour is simple and has been done before," says Lage. "But it's probably not been done as much in a musical realm, and particularly in the jazz realm, as much as it's been done in plays and dance. And for me, Gladwell is simply that, nothing more, nothing less. And what I thought was so appealing about the idea from an imagination point of view is that you only have music as a means of expressing this, so you have to focus your attention through song forms. Because even though I could write in the liner notes all about it, anyone who is going to hear this music on the radio wasn't going to know that story of Gladwell. So it was kind of a test: Can I convey these feelings I've been having over a period of years about music capturing a sense of place? And it soon became a very collaborative process because when I brought it to the band, they were like, 'Oh, well, what if this guy had this?' and 'What if there's a vilian?' and this and that. It was kind of fodder for my band and t he way we work, which is very much kind of like a laboratory - throw it up against the wall and see what sticks."
Aside from standing as a metaphor for a fictional place, Gladwell also reflects new growth for Lage on a couple of levels. "In addition to finding a musical path, I'm finding a personal path after moving to New York," he says. "I'm traveling a lot more than ever before, and I see music in a lot of ways as therapy for me. There is so much going on, and there are so many influences in today's music. Doing a project like Gladwell is a way for me to make sense of all this kind of chaos. I can put 18 elements into one song, and then all of a sudden it doesn't seem so chaotic. It sounds like music and I can be in 18 places at once, but if I think about Gladwell as a project, it becomes very simple. It's one town. That's all I have to worry about."
Incredibly, Gladwell was recorded in the same week that Lage recorded Gary Burton's latest album, Common Ground, which has the guitar phenom taking on a more prominent role in the band. He contributed the compositions "Etude" and "Banksy" while blending beautifully on the front line with the vibist's cascading sound in his new Gary Burton Quartet (which also features bassist Scott Colley and drummer Antonio Sanchez). Lage's working relationship with his mentor Burton goes back more than 10 years.
"When I was 12, I played on the Grammy Awards show. They did a piece that featured young jazz musicians. It was myself, Eldar on piano, Tony Royster Jr. on drums and Matt Brewer on bass. Matt was the oldest in the group at 17. And we played this segment that didn't last more than a minute or two on TV, which is actually a lot of time on a live telecast. We did Monk's 'Straight No Chaser' and I took a solo - one chorus, two choruses, maybe. And in that little window, Gary, who was there in the audience, saw me. He wrote me a letter shortly afterwards that said, 'From what little I saw, I enjoyed. I have this show coming up in your area and I need to play a 30 minute set. Can you do it?' That was our first gig, and it went great. Then a few months later he asked me to do a jazz cruise from New York to London on the Queen Elizabeth II, and that went great. After that, another opportunity to play together would come up every few months. So we cultivated these gigs here and there until he decided to have me join his band."
Lage subsequently played on Burton's 2004 album Generations (With pianist Makoto Ozone, bassist James Genus and drummer Clarence Penn) and on 2005's Next Generation (with pianist Vadim Neselovskyi, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer James Williams). He followed with appearances on two albums by his friend and fellow Bay area native, pianist Taylor Eigsti: 2006's Lucky To Be Me and 2008's Let It Come To You. Then came his acclaimed 2009 debut, Sounding Point.
Lage, who is touring this summer in The New Gary Burton Quartet in support of Common Ground, heaps praise upon his mentor. "A lot of how I approach music I learned from him at such a transitional period of my life - when I was still figuring out what it means to be a jazz musician - a lot of my vocabulary came from him. So I've sort of grown up learning from him and now I get to play with him in a different context 10 years later."
But Lage's amazing story doesn't begin with Burton. A musical prodigy from age 5, he was the subject of an Acadamy Award-nominated documentary, Jules At Eight, which followed the precocious and immensely talented young guitarist around his favorite San Francisco haunts, like the musical instrument store in Haight-Ashbury where he jams with a seasoned guitarist while expounding on his love of Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane. Shortly after that documentary was released to wide acclaim, Lage would perform with guitar great Carlos Santana, then by age 11 make his recording debut on David Grisman's Dawg Duos.
Given his affinity for conjuring up a sense of place in music, along with his particular fondness for the soundtrack work of Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Psycho, Vertigo, Cape Fear, Taxi Driver, ass well as episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone), it's not inconceivable that Lage will eventually make the leap into writing music for film.
"Oh I would love it!" he says. "My dream would be to do music for film. That, to me, would make so much sense. I've always been drawn to music that is multi-dimensional as far as the narrative goes. The simplest example would be Petrushka by Stravinsky, which goes with the play, The Rite Of Spring. It's music for a play. And what I've always liked is that these projects can be taken as musical entities, which is how I first heard it. But once I saw the play, I sort of put the whole story together and realized, 'It's got so much dimension if you choose to go down that path.'
"And I realized more with this Gladwell project than ever before that it's really comfortable for me to think about the visual and the musical as one. And when I say visual I mean not like just a picture, and image, but a series of images, like a movie or something that has a story line. It's funny, and it's nothing I deliberately tried to do, but I was actually storyboarding Gladwell in my head before I recorded it."
The budding soundtrack composer adds, "In recent years I've been so fond of make-believe. When you're a kid, everything is make-believe and imaginary, but then at some point you get kind of serious and you try to see things a little more structured. But now I'm, in a way, coming a little bit full circle. And the think about music is, you can have your head in the clouds, you're allowed to. If anything, it's your job. You have a social obligation to kind of dream up some random stuff. And how lucky are we that we get to do that." (Fall 2011 issue)
