E-Mail This Article to a Friend Young at heart Gary Burton’s protégés pull him back into the band business BY JON GARELICK

A few years ago, it didn’t seem anything could pull the incomparable jazz vibist Gary Burton back into being a bandleader. He was getting ready to retire from Berklee College of Music, where he had taught and served as an administrator (including Dean of Curriculum and, finally, executive vice-president) for more than 30 years. He was going to move to Fort Lauderdale and stick with the relative simplicity of his performing life of the past few years — duo concerts with either Makoto Ozone or Chick Corea. No bands.

But all that started to change when Burton saw a guitarist he’d never seen before on a brief segment of the 2000 Grammy Awards show. The guitarist had no more than 20 or 30 seconds for his solo, but he grabbed Burton’s attention, not so much with his technical fluency as with something less definable. "The time feel and the flow of what he was playing was just right in the groove, and very hard to do for 20 seconds. The spotlight swings to you and you’re on in front of 500 million people and it’s, ‘Okay, play.’ That’s hard for me to do. And I said to myself, ‘Hey, that’s the real thing. He can play.’ " The guitarist was Julian Lage, a student from Santa Rosa, California. He was 12 years old.

Burton wrote a note to Lage, and when he was asked to give a presentation at the Technology Entertainment and Design Conference (TED) in Monterey, he gave the boy a call. After that, "We would do the occasional small thing every year, a little gig here or there." During a school break, Lage and his parents joined the vibist on a performance cruise on the QE2. Burton, a former teenage star himself, is now 62, and he remembers thinking, "Well, by the time he’s old enough to be out working as a professional, a man in his 20s, you know, I’ll be in my 70s."

But Lage was developing in leaps. "My father played guitar," he says in a soft, thoughtful voice over the phone from California. "Not professionally, but just for his own enjoyment, around the house. He absolutely loved it, you know? And when I was four, I saw him doing that with that passion of his, and I asked if I could have a guitar, and it seemed like a reasonable request, and I thought, ‘Yeah, that would be really cool if I could do what my dad does.’ " Lage’s parents promised he’d get a guitar when he was five. "And when I was five, I was lucky to find a guitar in the house one day, and that’s when I started."

Lage studied with his father, then with local teacher Chris Pimentel, who was primarily a blues player, and then with the respected Bay Area teacher Randy Vincent, with whom he worked for eight years and still takes lessons when he gets the chance. Except that more often he plays as part of Vincent’s band, or with Burton.

Burton recorded with Lage in 2003 for the CD Generations (Concord); they were backed by the veteran rhythm section of Ozone, bassist James Genus, and drummer Clarence Penn. But he knew an actual working band was in the offing. "As soon as I realized Julian was ready to work on a steady basis, then I needed to start thinking, ‘Okay, who would I want to be in the band?’ " The next key player was pianist Vadim Neselovskyi, a Berklee student by way of Ukraine and Germany who, like a lot of Berklee students, stopped by Burton’s office and asked him to listen to a demo tape of his playing and his compositions. Neselovskyi invited Burton to come to one of his band’s gigs at the tiny Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square and then was stunned to see the teacher and star in the audience. "We were all really scared to play for him," he says, "but he seemed to like it." Not long after, he received an e-mail from Burton asking him to take part in a Berklee student recording session with another former Burton band guitarist, Pat Metheny.

Metheny too was a teenager when he joined Burton’s band — 19. Burton himself was 17 when he recorded with Nashville session guitarist Hank Garland. And now he’s with the 17-year-old Lage, the 27-year-old Neselovskyi, and bassist Luques Curtis and drummer James Williams, both 21. He likes young players, for one, "because they’re much more observant about what’s going on out on the scene. They’re hearing the latest records, tracking down the latest players. They’re also more likely to stumble onto something different, something new, and they’re more flexible in terms of trying things. If I say, ‘How about this, I can’t imagine how this might sound, try that,’ an older, more established player might say, ‘Uh, well, I don’t do that kind of thing well. Here’s how I do this.’ "