Lexington, want to heat up a cold December night? Where guitarist Julian Lage is playing.

The newest album by Julian Lage, curiously titled “View with a Room,” ends with a breezy earworm of a tune called “Fairbanks.”

It’s a deliciously elemental composition where the guitarist and five-time Grammy nominee luxuriates in melody. Forget the usual flash, histrionics or even innovations often affixed to the reputation of a champion instrumentalist.

Here, the accessibility of Lage’s playing – along with that of his current trio and the help of an esteemed guest, fellow guitar giant Bill Frisell – yields a sense of invitation and unshakeable warmth.

“If I speak as a fan of music, I definitely have this experience with musicians I love where I hear them and go, ‘Wow.’ There’s just this thing that seems really warm and inviting, but feels almost native, like you couldn’t shake it if you tried,” Lage said.

“‘Fairbanks,’ for instance, is a song exploring what happens when you just distill this warm melodic message in such a way where you don’t really have much else left, providing it can still support its own weight. In the case of that song, I think it can. There was this thought in mind of ‘What do I need to leave out so that the music feels even more florescent, so that its warmth feels obvious, so that its warmth feels like a really settled part of the vocabulary?’ I like that feature in music. I like that warm, inviting thing and I think the musicians I play with access that natively.”

Guitar prodigy grows up

Lage has spent nearly all his young life developing a pathway to such colorful, musical warmth. A child prodigy, he took up the guitar at age 5. By the time Lage was 8, he was jamming onstage with Carlos Santana. He played on the 2000 Grammy Awards telecast when he was 12, although the guitarist would have to wait until he was 21 until the first of his own Grammy nominations was announced.

During such an industrious youth, he has collaborated with some of the most respected jazz players of his generation, as well as from the one that preceded it. He began nearly a decade-long stay in the band of veteran vibraphonist and educator Gary Burton at 12 and has maintained steady working relationships with such esteemed musical journeymen as Frisell, composer John Zorn and saxophonist Charles Lloyd. There have also been projects that have seen Lage recording with such disparate artists as Bela Fleck and Yoko Ono.

An impressive resume, to be sure, for a guitarist who will turn 35 on Christmas Day.

“Like anybody’s life, I would project there’s sense of ‘when you’re in it, you’re in it,’” Lage said of establishing a critically lauded professional career at such a young age. “When you reflect upon it, it can take on a different tone. You go, ‘Wow, I guess that was a busy time.’ In my case, I can’t say I ever had a tremendous sense of perspective beyond the project at hand. ‘Okay, I’m starting a band. Okay, let’s make a record. Okay, now we’re on tour. Okay, now let’s start writing some new music.’ There is a certain rhythm to it all that, thus far, has felt very organic.

“Frankly, I think music operates that way. There is a sense of commitment and devotion to the craft and the practice. I’ve always felt very humble by the process. In so many respects, I feel similar now to when I was a kid just starting to play guitar. That’s probably because I’m not really doing anything that different.”

Even with a smattering of enticing side projects, including a sublime new trio album for Lloyd that also features veteran tabla player/percussionist Zakir Hussain titled “Trios: Sacred Thread,” the prime focus for Lage these days is his own trio with bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King.

Last performance in Lexington

Lage previously played a quickly assembled duet concert in Lexington for the Origins Jazz Series in March 2020 with King (popular outside his work with the guitarist as drummer for The Bad Plus.) The show helped make up for several shows scrapped that week in Japan due to the then-rapidly advancing COVID-19 pandemic. Nationwide lockdowns triggered by COVID began a matter of days after the performance. Lage’s Dec. 6 return with his full trio also will be an Origins presentation.

“It’s family, a musical family,” Lage said of the trio. “There’s a vocabulary that has been unfolding since we started playing together. The latest record probably features our compositional vocabulary in the strongest way yet. But there is also a live vocabulary that we care about very much. It’s kind of an auxiliary to what you hear on the record. For me, it feels like these are musicians I’m writing music for. I’m writing songs that feature the way we play. In so many respects, it is like a laboratory where everything comes through the band. It feels like a musical home for me, playing with Dave and Jorge.”

So where did the great Frisell enter the picture? Actually, the alliance between the two guitarists isn’t new. They have collaborated many times, sometimes even moonlighting in the same band (specifically, with Lloyd). But “View with a Room” is the first of the albums Lage has cut with his current trio that welcomed any outsider, much less a guest as distinctive sounding as Frisell, into the fold.

“I feel like I’ve known Bill for so long. I met him in my early 20s. I would see him around New York and we just became kind of instant friends. Then, through (the late guitar pioneer) Jim Hall, who was our mutual kind of mentor in a lot of ways, we would see each other even more. We continued that thread with some duo shows in New York and managed to tour together a couple of years ago.

“Bill is so singular in his voice and also so singular in his ability to meld with what we already had going on with the trio. We were this touring band, we’ve been doing it a certain way and Bill was able to slip into that world and expand the boundaries sonically.”

What’s next for Lage

So how will the next chapter in Lage’s prolific but still youthful jazz journey play out? For that, the guitarist refers to philosophies instilled in him by Burton during their extensive tenure together.

“Gary and I toured the world together. I stood by his side watching how it’s done in this kind of old school way, discovering what it means to be a consistent musician, where you’re not just good some of the time. That notion — how you translate your voice not only to your instrument but through your compositions or the songs you choose to play and the records you make — was revelatory.

“If you look at Gary’s life as a musician, it’s pretty astounding the amount of risks he’s taken, the shifts, the diversity of musicians he’s played with and the music he played. To me, that feels like, ‘Okay, that’s what we’ve got to do.’ Swing for the fences and just really take some risks.”

Julian Lage Trio

When: 7:30 p.m. Dec. 8

Where: Lexington Children’s Theatre, 418 W. Short St.

Tickets: $31, originsjazz.org

Extra: Lage will also present a Master Class at 6 Dec. 8 on the LCT stage. Tickets are $60 and do not include admission to the concert.