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Julian Lage thought he was dreaming when he got to grace the stage with slide guitar legend Derek Trucks, and needed to see video footage of the performance to confirm it really happened.
The jazz guitarist burst onto the scene before he hit his teens, culminating in an appearance at the Grammys aged 12, and picking up the award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album with his debut album 10 years later.
He’s had a pretty wild career, but playing with Derek Trucks might take the biscuit for the 38-year-old.
“It was our friend Mike Elizondo, who is a masterful bass player and producer,” he tells Guitar World of how he was introduced to the virtuoso.
“He produced Tedeschi Trucks’ new record, and they’ve known each other for years. Mike was in New York for the release of that album [2026’s Future Soul], and he was at the Beacon Theatre with Nels Cline and Derek, and just texted saying, ‘Can you be here Friday?’”
Needless to say, he was game to join the band, which Trucks co-leads with his Fender signature artist wife, Susan Tedeschi, on stage for a song.
“I, like everybody else on planet Earth, think Derek’s just the best,” Lage purrs. “He’s such a gift.”
Trucks himself was a child prodigy, having shared stages with Buddy Guy aged just nine, so it was something of a collision of kindred spirits. But it happened in a flash.
“It was over before I knew it,” he says. “I showed up, I plugged in, and it was over. I went home, and then I saw a video, and I thought, ‘I’m glad I didn’t dream it.’ I had a wonderful time.”
Lage stepped onto the Beacon Theater’s hallowed stage on March 20th, 2026, a white Fender Telecaster in hand. Trucks, armed, as usual, with a Gibson SG, led the way through a free-flowing and sprawling Keep on Growing that lasted the best part of 15 minutes.
Lage’s smile gives away how much of a blast he was having, counterbalancing Trucks’ biting blues licks with plenty of spangly charm of his own as his jazz background poked through in all the right ways.
“It’s a testament to the guitar,” Lage adds of the show. “It’s a very friendly instrument, you know. The genre thing isn’t really a thing when you’re with like-minded musicians.”
Trucks, meanwhile, has been enjoying his own ‘pinch me’ moment, having taken Jerry Garcia’s $11m Tiger guitar to the stage just hours after it became the world’s second most expensive guitar.
Lage’s full interview with Guitar World will be published online in the near-future.
