Aaron Shragge: Cosmic Cliffs
In his Whispering Worlds project, he plays special trumpet and shakuhachi in a quartet
Aaron Shragge plays both trumpet and shakuhachi flute. His new ambient and experimental album Cosmic Cliffs features his Whispering Worlds ensemble, with guitarist Luke Schwartz, bassist Damon Banks, and drummer Deric Dickens.
Shragge moved from Montreal to New York and took up Zen Buddhism in the early 2000s, in his early twenties, according to Peter Hum in a 2017 interview. He has been an active cross-border artist. His two past ensembles of note are Innocent When You Dream, which plays the music of Tom Waits instrumentally; and his duo with guitarist Ben Monder, where Mike Flynn of Jazzwise noted the "finelyweighted gravitas of Shragge's playing" in a review. That description certainly holds through on Cosmic Cliffs.
Shragge had a seemingly productive time through the pandemic. He streamed on Twitch, worked in a basement studio, and played on Brooklyn Raga Massive's remote Quarantine Dreams project, alongside friend of Rhythm Changes George Crotty and dozens of others.
Coming out of that period, Shragge played the 2022 Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT), directed by Dave Douglas, in New York City. He had been involved in the festival's Canadian chapter for several years previously. The band called Whispering Worlds emerged via that performance as a tribute to the late trumpeter Jon Hassell, who worked with Brian Eno, Stockhausen, Terry Riley, David Byrne, and Peter Gabriel to name a few.
A while after playing FONT 2022, Shragge posted on Instagram about his upcoming stream that would feature his "composition 'Cosmic Cliffs', an homage to Jon Hassell's composition Moons of Titan". Hassell's piece is a helpful touchstone for Shragge's work. It has a rhythm and time at its base layer, but the trumpet's sparse ringing definitely resembles the over 70 minutes of music on Shragge's album. "Cosmic Cliffs" is track one, nearly twice as long as "Moons of Titan". The trumpet contemplates long pitches. Guitar comes out with jazz notes from underneath a sea of drone, and from the kit Dickens gives gentle motion.
The raga-influenced "Pillars" does have a rhythm section groove. Banks hangs out on the fifth (or detuned) string of his electric bass as Shragge bends his notes beyond what the trumpet usually does, and as Schwartz's processed legato guitar takes over. When Shragge ad-libs alongside Schwartz, his distance from the microphone makes for an interesting sound.
On "Vernal Equinox / Hex / Caracas Night", Shragge allows himself the most open space to showcase his sound and his unique brass instrument here. The track "is an arrangement that integrated elements of three of Jon Hassell’s works from his debut album Vernal Equinox", Shragge says in the press materials for Cosmic Cliffs. Vernal Equinox is Hassell's debut as a leader, appropriately engineered on both sides of the border (Toronto and New York) in 1976 and 1977.
"Seen By The Moon / Secretly Happy" is a Shragge piece before the slash, a Hassell piece after the slash: check out the original piece and then find it here at around five minutes in. This track is the one with the most traditional band interplay. Another fun impression I got here? Quite a vibey guitar trio surrounds the leader.
The second half of Cosmic Cliffs consists of improvisations. It must be Shragge spending more time on the shakuhachi, but I find that the guitar gets more airtime. The first three improv tracks fly by when you've been used to 11-minute tracks. Don't worry, the last one is 11 minutes.
Last thing, for fun: the album came out on Adhyâropa Records, an artist-run label founded by Joe Brent and Andrew Ryan (the latter of whom I recently heard play bass with his now Juno-winning partner, Kaia Kater). The team successfully dodged a rule that music distributors try to enforce before you get your work onto streaming platforms. They distributed it under the album artist name Aaron Shragge, but the ensemble name Whispering Worlds appears on the cover art – and Shragge's name doesn't. Well played, independent spirits.
released March 28, 2025 | Buy CD (Bandcamp) | Available on streaming
