December 12, 2025
Julian Lage has shared his latest single “Talking Drum” from the guitarist’s fifth Blue Note release Scenes From Above due out January 23, 2026. The album marks his second collaboration with GRAMMY Award-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.
The quartet sizzles during “Talking Drum” as Medeski stabs his organ between the beat until he lifts up to ride alongside Lage and “discuss” the melody. 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.
The album – which follows 2024’s GRAMMY-nominated Speak To Me – was introduced last month with the gorgeous invocation, “Opal.”
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.”
The album’s nine compositions resulted from what Lage calls a writing sprint ahead of a residency at SFJAZZ, which marked the live debut of the band. As he thought about each of their qualities as players and hypothesized about how they might interact, he set a timer for 20 minutes, wrote a tune, recorded it once, and then began again.
“My dream with composing, really, is to have something to talk about once we’re together,” he says. “It’s not the end-all, be-all.”
“Julian really thinks about things, has a lot of intention,” says John Medeski. “But it’s a beautiful combination of caring about the concept and direction and of being free and in the moment.”
Scenes from Above radiates both qualities in tandem, and that’s what makes the album so poignant and timely.
