There’s something
about the walk along the South Bank towards the Royal
Festival Hall that makes it feel as though the evening has already begun
long before you reach your seat. London, in all of its colour and sound, slowly
unfolding around you like an overture. The Thames catching the last of the
early evening sun, the London Eye rotating
gently against a softening sky while, across the river, the newly restored Elizabeth Tower glistens gold in the fading
light. Overhead, triple sevens make their slow descent towards Heathrow Airport, banking low across the
skyline, while below by Festival Pier the rhythm of a reggae band drifts
upwards from an impromptu riverside performance that has stopped passers-by in
their tracks.
And somewhere in
all of that movement — the river traffic, the distant conversations, the hum of
trains arriving and departing across the city — Stephen Sondheim’s words
quietly come to mind: “Another hundred people just got off of the train…”
London carrying on exactly as London always does. Alive. Restless. Beautifully
chaotic.
Yet inside, another kind of listening waits.
The Royal Festival
Hall has its own kind of silence. A room this size never truly falls quiet all
at once; it gradually exhales into stillness. Conversations fade row by row,
latecomers slip quietly into seats, and then the hall settles. Nearly 2,750 people
somehow arriving at the same shared stillness together for Julian Lage’s largest European headline show to
date.
And that same
sense of collective attention sits at the very heart of Scenes From Above.
What becomes
immediately apparent hearing this music live is just how closely the atmosphere
of the album mirrors the experience of being in the room with this quartet. Scenes
From Above doesn’t announce itself through grand gestures or dramatic
flourishes. Quite the opposite. The music seems to arrive already in motion, as
though the band had been playing long before the listener wandered into
earshot. Themes drift in and out like overheard conversations from another part
of the hall. Melodies catch the light briefly before disappearing again.
And that is exactly
its strength.
Lage has long
since reached the point where technical brilliance no longer needs proving.
There is none of the performative urgency that sometimes creeps into modern
guitar records. No sense of a player trying to dominate the room. Instead, both
the album and the live performance feel built around trust, interplay and
shared listening. Even the compositions themselves often feel less like fixed
statements and more like starting points for conversation — four musicians
responding to one another and gently reshaping the music in real time.
The stage design
inside the Festival Hall only deepened that intimacy. Three large Persian rugs
spread across the floor — perhaps even an unconscious nod towards Persian
Rug, the second track from Arclight,
Lage’s fourth solo studio album — while minimal lighting softly blurred the
edges of the vast room and a sound mix so immediate and close made the hall
itself almost disappear. There was very little reverb in the sound. Everything
felt human-sized despite the scale of the venue. You never felt dwarfed by the
room. Instead, the audience leaned in.
And then Lage
walked on and simply began to play.
No grand entrance.
No extended introductions. Just music appearing almost mid-thought, as though
the evening had already started before we arrived. In fact, that became the
theme of the night. Lage barely spoke for much of the set, pausing only after
the opening three numbers to introduce the band, and then once more before the
closing piece. The music itself did the talking — flowing continuously,
naturally, without interruption or showmanship.
When he finally
did address the audience, it somehow made the room lean in even further. Softly
and almost shyly, he introduced bassist Jorge
Roeder, drummer Kenny Wollesen and John Medeski on Hammond organ and piano before
quietly revealing the titles that had drifted past almost unnoticed in the flow
of the set. A new composition opened the evening before giving way to Aberdeen,
followed by another new piece titled After All. Later came Borrowed
Light and Talking Points, titles delivered almost as an
afterthought, the music itself having already said far more than words could
have managed.
The quartet
setting plays a huge part in why both the album and the live show feel so
absorbing. Medeski’s presence changes the temperature of the music entirely.
His Hammond doesn’t sit behind the arrangements so much as wrap itself around
them, adding warmth and shadow in equal measure. At times the organ acted
almost like weather moving underneath the music — subtle swells, gospel hues,
smoky textures and sustained chords stretching the band into places they may
not otherwise have reached. There were moments where you could feel him gently
pulling Lage further outward, encouraging risk, elongating phrases and opening
doors.
Meanwhile, Roeder
and Wollesen kept everything moving with an almost invisible touch. Nothing
felt pushed. The momentum came from underneath, gentle but constant, like the
slow movement of crowds spilling back along the South Bank after the final
encore.
Lage later
acknowledged this collective spirit too, introducing long time engineer Mark Goodell with genuine warmth, telling the
audience, “If you’ve heard us on record, it’s through his ears.” It was a small
moment, but revealing. Even in a performance so centred around instinct and
interplay, there remained a deep sense of trust running through every part of
the evening.
What makes Scenes
From Above so absorbing is the way it mirrors moods rather than dictating
them. It is reflective without becoming distant, lyrical without drifting into
sentimentality. Many of these compositions feel more like fleeting sketches
than fully pinned-down statements. Ideas emerge, circle one another and quietly
drift away again before becoming fixed. In lesser hands, that might feel
incomplete. Here it feels human. Like memory. Like passing scenes glimpsed
through rain-streaked windows crossing Waterloo Bridge late at night.
There are moments
where folk melodies, Americana and something looser — almost calypso-like at
times — quietly surface beneath the jazz language. But nothing is underlined
too heavily. The music resists obvious climaxes at every turn. Even its most
lyrical passages remain understated, content simply to exist in the moment
rather than demand attention.
What was striking
inside the Festival Hall was how completely the audience surrendered to that
pace. In most large venues, there is restlessness: the rustle of programmes,
latecomers, trips to the bar, the low murmur that reminds you of the room’s
size. Here, there was concentration. Silence in the right places. Thousands of
people were listening with the attentiveness usually reserved for much smaller
spaces.
One of the lasting
thoughts from the evening didn’t actually arrive until much later, somewhere on
the journey home. My guest began describing what they had heard in Lage’s
music, and, strangely, it barely resembled the emotional landscape I had
experienced sitting beside them for the previous ninety minutes. Certain
passages that had felt reflective and almost melancholy to me had landed with
them as hopeful, even uplifting. And it suddenly struck me just how deeply
subjective music really is.
We don’t simply
hear music. We meet it where we are in life at that particular moment.
Sometimes lyrics
gently guide us towards a meaning. A songwriter points us in a direction, gives
us a framework for emotion. But here, tonight, there were no words to hold
onto. No narrative is being handed down. The interpretation belonged entirely
to each individual in that room. Nearly three thousand people sitting together,
all hearing the same notes, yet quietly building their own private versions of
the music inside themselves.
And perhaps that,
more than anything, is the beauty of music like this.
It asks nothing of
you, yet somehow gives you exactly what you need.
You can lean all
the way in and dissect every phrase, every harmonic turn, every subtle
conversation between the players. Or you can simply let it exist around you —
like light through a window or the sound of rain somewhere in the distance —
and it still works. It still finds its place. That is the cleverness of it. The
absence of demand. The absence of instruction.
Lage’s music seems
to leave space deliberately. Space for memory, space for emotion, space for the
listener to quietly place themselves somewhere inside it.
And perhaps that
is why Scenes From Above lingers long after it ends. It does not grab
you by the lapels, demanding attention. Instead, it quietly draws you closer
over time, rewarding patience and deep listening in the same way the very best
live performances do.
As the summer
unfolds, with appearances including North Sea
Jazz Festival across the weekend of 10–12 July, these compositions
already feel perfectly suited to those vast open-ended festival evenings where
daylight lingers long after the music has started. Music that does not need to
shout to hold a crowd. Music that simply asks people to lean in together, even
in the largest of spaces.
The final notes
may have faded, but nobody inside the hall seemed remotely ready to let the
evening end. For a moment, there was that brief suspended silence — the kind
that only follows music which has genuinely moved people — before the entire
room rose almost as one. Wave after wave of applause rolled around the Festival
Hall, filling the vast space with something that felt far bigger than
appreciation alone. It felt grateful. The kind of response reserved for
evenings where an audience instinctively understands they have witnessed
something rare.
And still the
applause continued.
Lage and the band
eventually returned to the stage for one final piece, greeted not with noise
but with warmth; the kind of reception that comes from a crowd completely
connected to what they had just experienced together. The closing number
arrived almost like a final exhale, delicate and unhurried, carrying the same
quiet intimacy that had defined the entire evening.
Then, once more,
the audience rose to their feet.
Not out of
obligation. Not because concert etiquette demands it. But because somewhere
over the previous ninety minutes, inside that softened light and those patient
unfolding melodies, Julian Lage and his remarkable band had created something
people genuinely did not want to let go of.
Outside
afterwards, the South Bank had returned to its usual Friday-night rhythm. The
Thames flickered beneath the bridges, crowds drifted back towards Waterloo,
planes continued their slow procession overhead, and down by Festival Pier the
reggae rhythms from earlier had now given way to Cuban beats, drawing a very
different crowd yet no less engaged — couples dancing happily in the cooling
spring evening air as the city carried on around them. But for ninety minutes
inside the Festival Hall, Julian Lage and his band had managed to suspend time
a little.
And in a room that
size, that’s no small achievement. Glenn Wright
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