With his microtonal trumpet equipped with a glissando device, NY-based trumpeter Aaron Shragge (at the front of his Whispering Worlds quartet) creates vast, nebulous sonic spaces tinged with Indian and ambient influences. Basically very influenced by avant-garde contemporary trumpeter Jon Hassell, Shragge demonstrates the depth of his debt to his elder (who died in 2021) by incorporating, often ethereally, passages from tracks previously recorded by Hassell. Take, for example, Moons of Jupiter from Seeing Through Pictures, the master’s last studio album, scattered echoes of which appear here and there in the title track Cosmic Cliffs. Like Hassell, who has dabbled in improvisation as well as Hindustani music, the avant-garde and minimalism (he has worked with Stockhausen and Riley), Shragge is not intimidated by any stylistic boundaries, although Cosmic Cliffs is more firmly on the spiritual jazz and world improv side than the experimental and atonal.
What would have been a weed or LSD trip listening to the Mahavishnu Orchestra or some of Pink Floyd’s exploratory flights of fancy in the 1970s is now music created without the aid of substantial hallucinogens, and in full possession of well-controlled intellectual resources. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a big one if you feel like it, so much so that this sitar-like trumpet, coiled on an electro-jazz cushion and supported by an acoustic rhythm section and a vaporous electronic atmosphere, seems to have come straight out of a blossoming commune.
There are four of them to make us levitate so beautifully: Aaron Shragge – Trumpet, Shakuhachi,
electronics; Luke Schwartz – guitar, electronics; Damon Banks – bass; Deric Dickens – drums.
An album that soars with serenity, which is an apt proposition in the present socio-political context.
