ALREADY THERE? Julian Lage's musical taste and awareness sound a lot older than his 17 years.
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On the band’s just-released debut, Next Generation, you can hear the excitement, but what’s really surprising is the maturity. Plenty of young virtuosi can cook at fast tempos, but Lage was already impressive on Generations in his solo on Pat Metheny’s "Take Another Look," where his ability to shape a legato lyric line at a ballad tempo was downright ancient in its awareness. He also shines on his own "Walkin’ in Music," from the new album, mixing single-note lines and chords and repeating phrases with bluesy intensity. "It is legato and laid back," Lage says of his performance on "Take Another Look," and he adds that his approach is probably as much a function of his personality as of his technique. "If you heard me on different nights, you’d probably notice that I’m more laid back than the other extreme of pushing and being really edgy." Even when he tears into the up-tempo, angular Carla Bley composition "Syndrome" — a long-time standard in the Burton book — he never sounds rushed, altering the flow of notes, the quality of attack, giving each phrase its particular flavor. "It’s a weird combination. You have to have a sense of urgency, and at the same time you don’t want to sound like you’re way ahead of yourself and out of control, because then it just sounds confused. Bill Evans. Jim Hall. Sonny Rollins certainly has that. Hank Mobley. I mean, not just players who were laid back but people who could flow beautifully. Chick Corea is one of the greatest examples of someone who can just make you believe that everything’s the most important note in the world and he’s in no hurry to tell it to you." Lage credits Burton with helping him think of each piece as a performance with its own character. "I don’t want to mess this up, because it was his idea, but it was kind of the idea that each tune has a personality and you can think of each song as a script and you’re an actor. So when you’re playing a tango piece, you can kind of imagine the mood that a tango song would evoke. And since you’re the actor, you have to play that role, you have to go into the sad parts of it and the dramatic parts, and even though you might want to say, ‘Oh, I know this lick sounds really good on this chord,’ you have to kind of put that aside and say, ‘If I’m center stage trying to act this piece out, how do I do it? How do I make people believe that this is a tango?’ " It was Burton, says Lage, who helped him decide how to approach his own tune, "Early," which Lage had presented as a demo in several different styles, including tango. "I think that’s one of the knacks Gary has, one of his greatest gifts, is that he can see a piece and understand what it calls for." He watched Burton attack various details of the piece in his own playing as well as maintain focus on the tango approach. "I would watch and I thought, ‘God, that makes sense — that’s how you play ‘Early.’ " Of course, there are other things about playing with Gary Burton. Neselovskyi says, "I felt Berklee was a pretty tough school, and I learned a lot and I am so thankful to this wonderful college. But after I graduated and started to play with Gary, that’s where the real life school started. Just having him solo and then to have to play after him, that’s the toughest challenge in the world. And it made me practice more than ever, because you go home and you think, ‘All right, you’ve got to get better!’ " Neselovskyi also finds Burton inspiring as a bandleader. "The way he rehearses, the way he supports. I’m a bandleader myself, and after this I will be a better leader. I have a feeling he would never hurt you, and this is a very unusual thing for bandleaders in general, and especially for a bandleader of such a caliber." Like Lage and bassist Curtis, Neselovskyi is already contributing pieces to the band’s repertoire — the stately "Prelude for Vibes" on the new album as well as a tricky arrangement of the fourth movement from Samuel Barber’s piano sonata, "Fuga," in which the fugue format allows for rich contrapuntal interplay. And Burton, as always, is a master of rhythmic orchestration, harmonic color, and gorgeous, long-lined solos. Burton says of his young players, "As a teacher and as a bandleader all these years, I just get off on seeing them discover things, find things, and succeed at things. Their excitement is infectious." The Gary Burton Quintet plays this Tuesday, April 26, at the Regattabar, in the Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street in Harvard Square; call (617) 661-5000.
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