Jazz enthusiasts, like any other religious converts, can often tell you the exact moment they were radicalized. Perhaps it was through early exposure to Kind of Blue; a chance encounter with Time Out; even a soul-shaking rendezvous with Art Blakey’s Moanin’. It’s no knock against guitarist Julian Lage’s crackling, exploratory album Love Hurts to say that it will probably never reach such rarified stature as those venerated classics, yet one of its great joys is the totally reasonable notion that it could be that kind of album for someone—a gateway drug, a point of entry. That’s a distinction it reaches through infectious energy and careful equilibrium. Love Hurts is deep and wide enough that it nobly and effectively evinces the richness of the jazz tradition, yet it’s also tight, tuneful, and seldom demanding—an album that welcomes even the uninitiated with pleasures both visceral and intellectual.

That’s not the only sense in which you could call it a gateway album; it’s a gateway for Lage himself, a wanderer and a roamer for whom improvisational music is the launchpad, not the final destination. On Love Hurts, he uses the jazz tradition as a portal, a trailhead for further explorations; the final chapter in a loose trilogy of guitar trio albums, it codifies his porous, catholic take on the form, one that subsumes the brash rumble of embryonic rock and roll, the clean lines and evocative formalism of the Great American Songbook, and the rustic solitude of folk music. This is the pluckiest entry in a trifecta that also includes the well-regarded Arclight and Modern Lore, and its restlessness may be attributable both to a change of venue and of personnel. Lage cut this set at The Loft—the Chicago studio that’s gestated many a Wilco and Jeff Tweedy joint—and his guitar heroics are anchored by the cool fretwork of bassist Jorge Roeder and the mighty wallop of Bad Plus drummer Dave King. Both share Lage’s zeal for discovery, and King in particular stands unequalled for his complement of nimble swing and blunt-force power. Their natural rapport generates first-take immediacy; indeed, Love Hurts was recorded live in just a day and a half.

The trio’s combustible chemistry is the rocket fuel for these hungry performances. A razor-sharp take on Ornette Coleman’s “Tomorrow is the Question” trades the original’s brassy buoyancy for cutthroat thrills—a high-speed chase down a tightrope wire. More raucous still is a haywire reading of Keith Jarrett’s “The Windup,” which sounds like the whole band’s tumbling down a spiral staircase, Lage shredding his way to the bottom and King’s snap crackle and pop illuminating every step along the way. These intuitive experiments in locomotion provide the album with plenty of flash, but Lage also knows when to lay back and let the melodies speak for themselves. A former child prodigy, he learned a long time ago that pure technique only carries you so far, and he brings a hymn-like austerity to the title cut, a song associated the likes of The Everly Brothers, Gram Parsons, and Emmylou Harris. Lage lingers over every note, as if probing for maximum anguish and melancholy, and the song finds its cognate in a smoky, album-closing version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” played with the same sparkling clarity. These songs capture the same vast frontier solitude you might here on an album by William Tyler.

They also point to Lage’s standing as a folklorist, a collector of American songs who is untroubled by genre or orthodoxy. He’s interested in songs with rich lineages, and to that end he also uncrumples the dog-eared standard “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” played with lilting romance and soft-shoe charm. His only writing credit is for a song called “In Circles,” a ghostly ballad that loops back on itself like a serpent eating its own tail. It’s an exercise in discovery, the band feeling their way through the parameters of this unvetted text, and it finds a companion in the album-opening “In Heaven”—a David Lynch fever dream with which Lage claims a certain level of obsession. As Lage unfolds the song’s elegiac melody, his clean guitar lines are caught in a cloud of static smudge—but then the song opens up into the ambling pace of Roeder’s bass, crisp cymbal pops from King, and smoldering blues wrung from Lage’s guitar. Like so much of Love Hurts, it feels like equipoise—familiar sounds enlivened with the thrill of shared discovery; as evocative as it is accessible.