Julian Lage — artist
A child prodigy, Lage was the subject of the 1996 short documentary film Jules at Eight. At 12, he performed at the 2000 Grammy Awards. Three years later, he became a faculty member of the Stanford Jazz Workshop at Stanford University. Classically trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he has studied at Sonoma State University and the Ali Akbar College of Music. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 2008. “I absolutely love improvised music, and I've always been fascinated by singer-songwriter music. For me, the jazz that came out of Blue Note always engaged both sides of that. It had incredible improvisational vocabularies and performances, but when I think of albums from Grant Green’s Idle Moments to Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge to McCoy Tyner’s Time for Tyner with Bobby Hutcherson – all these records that I love so much also have such great songs.”