Young at heart Gary Burton's protégés pull him back into the band business BY JON GARELICK
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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 Boston's 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.’ "

On the band’s just-released debut, Next Generation, you can hear the excitement, but what’s really surprising is the maturity. Plenty of young virtuosi can cook at fast tempos, but Lage was already impressive on Generations in his solo on Pat Metheny’s "Take Another Look," where his ability to shape a legato lyric line at a ballad tempo was downright ancient in its awareness. He also shines on his own "Walkin’ in Music," from the new album, mixing single-note lines and chords and repeating phrases with bluesy intensity.

"It is legato and laid back," Lage says of his performance on "Take Another Look," and he adds that his approach is probably as much a function of his personality as of his technique. "If you heard me on different nights, you’d probably notice that I’m more laid back than the other extreme of pushing and being really edgy." Even when he tears into the up-tempo, angular Carla Bley composition "Syndrome" — a long-time standard in the Burton book — he never sounds rushed, altering the flow of notes, the quality of attack, giving each phrase its particular flavor. "It’s a weird combination. You have to have a sense of urgency, and at the same time you don’t want to sound like you’re way ahead of yourself and out of control, because then it just sounds confused. Bill Evans. Jim Hall. Sonny Rollins certainly has that. Hank Mobley. I mean, not just players who were laid back but people who could flow beautifully. Chick Corea is one of the greatest examples of someone who can just make you believe that everything’s the most important note in the world and he’s in no hurry to tell it to you."

Lage credits Burton with helping him think of each piece as a performance with its own character. "I don’t want to mess this up, because it was his idea, but it was kind of the idea that each tune has a personality and you can think of each song as a script and you’re an actor. So when you’re playing a tango piece, you can kind of imagine the mood that a tango song would evoke. And since you’re the actor, you have to play that role, you have to go into the sad parts of it and the dramatic parts, and even though you might want to say, ‘Oh, I know this lick sounds really good on this chord,’ you have to kind of put that aside and say, ‘If I’m center stage trying to act this piece out, how do I do it? How do I make people believe that this is a tango?’ "

It was Burton, says Lage, who helped him decide how to approach his own tune, "Early," which Lage had presented as a demo in several different styles, including tango. "I think that’s one of the knacks Gary has, one of his greatest gifts, is that he can see a piece and understand what it calls for." He watched Burton attack various details of the piece in his own playing as well as maintain focus on the tango approach. "I would watch and I thought, ‘God, that makes sense — that’s how you play ‘Early.’ "

Of course, there are other things about playing with Gary Burton. Neselovskyi says, "I felt Berklee was a pretty tough school, and I learned a lot and I am so thankful to this wonderful college. But after I graduated and started to play with Gary, that’s where the real life school started. Just having him solo and then to have to play after him, that’s the toughest challenge in the world. And it made me practice more than ever, because you go home and you think, ‘All right, you’ve got to get better!’ " Neselovskyi also finds Burton inspiring as a bandleader. "The way he rehearses, the way he supports. I’m a bandleader myself, and after this I will be a better leader. I have a feeling he would never hurt you, and this is a very unusual thing for bandleaders in general, and especially for a bandleader of such a caliber."

Like Lage and bassist Curtis, Neselovskyi is already contributing pieces to the band’s repertoire — the stately "Prelude for Vibes" on the new album as well as a tricky arrangement of the fourth movement from Samuel Barber’s piano sonata, "Fuga," in which the fugue format allows for rich contrapuntal interplay. And Burton, as always, is a master of rhythmic orchestration, harmonic color, and gorgeous, long-lined solos.

Burton says of his young players, "As a teacher and as a bandleader all these years, I just get off on seeing them discover things, find things, and succeed at things. Their excitement is infectious."

The Gary Burton Quintet plays this Tuesday, April 26, at the Regattabar, in the Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts's Harvard Square; call (617) 661-5000.