January 9, 2026
Guitar virtuoso Julian Lage has shared his epic new single, “Night Shade,” accompanied by an official live performance video. Lage’s highly anticipated fifth full-length Blue Note release, Scenes From Above, arrives Jan. 23.
Scenes From Above marks Lage’s second album made in collaboration with GRAMMY-winning producer Joe Henry and first with a striking new quartet featuring keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Album pre-orders/pre-saves are available now in a variety of formats including black vinyl, CD, and digital download, as well as a brown vinyl variant available exclusively on the Julian Lage Artist Store and the Blue Note Store.
“Night Shade” is the album’s exquisite seven-minute centerpiece, suffused with a Medeski organ run that feels like gospel gold and a series of Lage solos that suggest brilliantly gestural blues. Throughout the exhilarating journey, the music continually crests like a wave, about to crack open into something that resembles chaos, but the band holds steady both to be heard and to hear others. This is what makes Scenes from Above so poignant and timely — four dazzling instrumentalists in a room, talking to one another but never actually over one another.
Scenes From Above – which follows 2024’s GRAMMY® Award-nominated Speak To Me – was introduced in November with the gorgeous invocation, “Opal,” and followed in December by “Talking Drum,” which sees the quartet sizzling as Medeski stabs his organ between the beat until he lifts up to ride alongside Lage and “discuss” the melody. There is, as Lage had hoped, plenty to talk about. The track is as close as Scenes From Above gets to groove and jam, but there is a gleeful resistance to it, too, of never sitting still with a solo or rhythm. The band gets into the idea and gets out, too excited by what may still happen to belabor anything they’ve already found.
Lage will celebrate the arrival of Scenes From Above with a busy international live schedule, including eagerly awaited 2026 quartet performances at Knoxville, Tennessee’s Big Ears Festival (March 29), Savannah, Georgia’s Savannah Music Festival (April 1), and London’s Royal Festival Hall (May 15). Additional dates will be announced soon. For complete details and ticket information, please visit www.julianlage.com/tour.
Where 2024’s Speak to Me was Lage’s grand statement as an improvising bandleader helming an ensemble through a diverse set of tunes, Scenes from Above is about being a band member himself, about Lage exploring the tunes he has written with a crew he has built with that entirely in mind. Its nine tracks frame a brilliantly open experience, with four astounding players giving and taking space in equal measure as they explore these songs in one space, in real time.
“I came in with a desire to present this as an egalitarian thing, rather than ‘I’m the leader — let’s build something around me,’” Lage says. “This is music that’s connected to our own growth and development individually and within our relationships with one another, with no sense that anybody’s expecting anything.”
