Possible Sounds : Aaron Shragge Whispering Worlds

Just as the group of blind men drew divergent conclusions about elephants after touching particular parts of the animal, jazz means different things to different people, depending on one’s taste and experience. We heard a particular sliver of the diverse world of jazz on March 8, as 35 of us gathered at Holyoke Media to listen to Aaron Shragge Whispering Worlds. The quartet: Shragge (trumpet, shakuhachi, effects), Luke Schwartz, (guitar, effects), Deric Dickens (drums) and Damon Banks (bass guitar), took us on an ethereal, 75-minute journey through a sound world inspired by the late Jon Hassell.

Although the music was written by Shragge, the compositions were animated by his love of Hassell’s other-worldly oeuvre. Like Hassell’s vision, Shragge’s music unfurled on a new age wave of electronics. Using two Ableton enabled laptops, beds of synthetic sound made it possible to float easily into a meditative state.

The world of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker and Ornette felt very far away.

Shragge’s unique Dragon Mouth trumpet, patterned after Maynard Ferguson’s 70s-era prototype called the “Firebird”, is basically a regular valve trumpet with a soprano trombone slide. The slide enables Shragge to emulate bent notes commonly used in North Indian classical vocal music. When combined with the echo, loops and distortions made possible by his electronics, the sound was at once amorphous and enveloping.

Shragge, who has lived in Amherst since 2020, has had an interesting career in music. He has played extensively with guitarist Ben Monder (now part of The Bad Plus), is part of the boundary busting ensemble Brooklyn Raga Massive, was active in the big-tented Festival of New Trumpet, and leads a band that plays the music of Tom Waits. He’s also a licensed music therapist. Shragge’s long-time Zen practice led him to the shakuhachi, an ancient Japanese bamboo flute. Soon after getting to New York, he was handed a shakuhachi by the esteemed teacher, Ronnie Nyogetsu Reishin Seldin, founder and director of the Ki-Sui-An Shakuhachi Dojo. Shragge is now expert on the instrument.

Shragge got to play with Hassell, whose career as a trumpeter and composer intersected with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne and Carl Craig, among many others. This Jazz Shares concert with Whispering Worlds motivated me to pull out my two Jon Hassell records: his 1980 debut, Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, and Flash of the Spirit, his 1987 recording with Farafina, an ensemble of musicians from Burkina Faso. Hassell’s integration of percussion and electronics (Possible Musics featured the brilliant Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos), was mirrored in the work of Whispering Worlds’ Deric Dickens.

Amidst all the swirling, ambient sounds, Dickens acoustic drumming was a grounding force, providing drive and forward momentum. The Brooklyn-based percussionist augmented our Jazz Shares Gretsch Catalina Club kit with a variety of bells and other metal instruments to produce a welcome scaffolding for the atmospherics of the rest of the band. Dickens can be found on stage and recordings with Daniel Carter, Russ Lossing, Caroline Davis and Sara Schoenbeck. His 2011 release, Speed Date, where he invited collaborators like Kirk Knuffke, Matt Wilson, Jeff Lederer and Jeremy Udden to perform with him in duos, is a good place to dive into Dickens work.

Like Dickens, I was meeting guitarist Luke Schwartz for the first time. Both were generous, gracious and extremely talented. Schwartz integrated his articulate guitar lines with his laptop-infused output, resulting in a constant reweaving of the band’s tonal fabric. With its emphasis on layered textures and the engrossing sound environment, Saturday’s concert had the feel of a soundtrack. Schwartz, who was part of guitarist and composer Glenn Branca’s world, has extensive experience in sound design and film scoring. His work with Rick Cox, led to collaboration with the influential Hollywood film composer Thomas Newman, and through them he met and worked with Jon Hassell to help compose a 30-minute piece for sculptor Charles Long that was released on Hassell’s label, Ndeya.

I first crossed paths with electric bassist Damon Banks when Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra and Arun Ramamurthy’s Trio performed in the Valley. I also got to spend time with him when he accompanied his wife, violinist Gwen Laster, when she headlined a Jazz Shares concert in January. He has stayed at our home and become a friend. Banks has a flexible musical mind, ready to provide whatever the moment demands. Although an outsider to Hassell’s world, he certainly is familiar with drones and non-western music through work with Hassan Hakmoun, Arto Lindsay, Angelique Kidjo and Karsh Kale. The Bronx-born, Fisk University educated, Banks has also collaborated with artists as diverse as George Benson, Sekou Sundiata, Wadada Leo Smith and Angela Bofill.

After the gig in Holyoke, Whispering Worlds performed in North Adams, MA and Beacon, NY  celebrating the release of their new recording, Cosmic Cliffs, (Adhyaropa Records). The results, available digitally and on CD, was expertly mixed by Luke Schwartz. It is a fantastic listening experience and an important part of the jazz elephant.

A World of Piano in Three Parts

by Joe Major

February 27-28, March 1, 2025

Northampton Center for the Arts

After a years-long hiatus, A World of Piano marked its third straight festival series at Northampton Center for the Arts. Jazz Shares circuit-goers welcomed the annual three-day return with equal parts heightened anticipation, determined examination and pilgrimage-worthy stamina — qualities that in no small measure were reflected in the solo pianists themselves.

They hailed from a big tent, did practitioners Matthew Shipp, Greg Burk and Sylvie Courvoisier. And from within their improvised music spheres, there existed a consistent wondrous through line of varied probing aspect: from expressive driven intonation to expressive mathematic chordal contortion to expressive check-under-the-hood innards manipulation. Expression reigned.

Night One: Matthew Shipp. Instant ignition. From the opening of the nearly set-long piece that I came to think of as Opus One, Shipp immersed listeners in tumultuous storm-tossed furies. His relentless scrums of muscular glissandos, followed by lulls barely porous enough to allow a recuperative shard of hopeful light to escape, formed a thrum beat of heaving, reluctant elasticity.

With a prospector’s fervor to persist, persist, perchance to comp, perchance to rep, plus a rarely exercised penchant to alight, nothing was safe from his roiling bottom register checklist of assertive edicts, grievances and pronouncements. That rise and fall schematic seemed simple enough, but what sustained it were the intricacies embedded in the full throttle fusillade. There was inevitably an integrated back-channel leverage of chiming, extoling, bursting release — rooting out the verities from the calamitous dross.

A concert comrade of mine mentioned that henceforth he’d “think of piano as a verb.” That’s it; that unfettered, uninhibited, regenerative pianism deployed in the service of translating emotion, and showing your work while doing so. Shipp finished by surfing over and navigating through the mild undulations of a slurred, feathery, ethereal cloud — levitating, as if to suggest there were more tools in his toolbox than just thump widgets. After the set I approached Shipp and deferentially offered that the evening brought to mind the Walt Whitman line, “I contain multitudes.” And to my everlasting delight, Shipp responded, “Huh, I love Whitman!”

Night Two: Greg Burk. Prestidigitation. Many of Burk’s painterly, pastoral compositions were undeniably beauteous; sweeping, lushly saturated soundscapes that belied an inner, angular gravity.  Coursing through his tapestry, a nuanced thread of wariness might be discerned in the otherwise shimmering fabric. His lavish light-fingered classicism was initially overwhelming, sprouting as it did with cascading upper register filigree. On numbers like “Petals on the Water” and a lovely reverent piece dedicated to his mother, Burk subtly transitioned from haltingly articulate, swooning melodic bits to velvety comped pangs of abstraction. Cloaked abstraction, abstraction born of seemingly plain-view lines intersecting with one another in just the right sequences to create an introspective, suddenly outside-of-self otherness.

There was no ambiguation about “Blues for Yusef Lateef.” He opened with a breathy ceremonial-sounding pipe flute meditation that evolved into a jaunty syncopated exploration featuring a rollicking knockabout bottom and a squirrelly high end. The aftermath of the big crescendo led to a leeward slide, a stilted stride-style cadence that never abandoned the look-inside-oneself ethos.

Nor were there any doubts about a couple of outright prancing romps, one of which Burk said was Bird-inspired. Both were replete with pixilated, unabashedly jazzy pokes and runs that, despite the louche aura of the Parker-esque tune, retained a signature Burk sparkle. And both bore the earmarks of Burk architecture; grand archways in which substantive and exquisite chord arrays could investigate.

Two tunes, “Sequoia Song” and “Clean Spring,” swapped out any semblance of the shell game gambit. There were no opaque intentions or quick-look-there legerdemain, and abstraction distractions were vanquished. Instead, a crisp effervescence permeated the joie de la nature; sinewy for one, bubbly for the other. Their straight forward direction lent a dexterous air of dimensional relief to Burk’s work. And to my ear, wispy hints of Abdullah Ibrahim only added resonant grace to the performance.

Night Three: Sylvie Courvoisier. Avant-garde acoustic bric a brac boutique. En garde! Buckle up! Courvoisier’s set was a riveting, careening tour through what essentially amounted to her sound sculpture. She staged the piano so that it was chockablock with hardware items, whimsical trinkets and everyday jetsam, integrating the resulting sonic effects with her oft measured, oft rampant keyboard trajectories. It was a curated exploration of the symbiotic string/soundboard relationship.

The sounds — from ticks and tocks, to clinks and clunks, to harmonic drone-like vibration, to the anvil-like thunk of her elbow on the keys — cleaved to her demonstrative, fervent, asymmetrical piano playing. But beyond that, the whole enterprise writ large sought to find and develop a cohesive, viable syntax for this ungainly, instantly-appearing piano language.

There were four forays. The first was a stringy pluck-and-play that alternately veered from progressions of thunder and lull into rivulets of tinny pie plate-sounding classical, jazzy-tempo jive, and sacred temple tonalities. She paced herself with some near-ragtime, near-stride, and then, like a Dave Burrell, she’d succumb to out of the blue chaotic spasms of abstraction and distraction. Her piano-speak concoctions were punctuated with violent black hole implosions, leaving gaping, gulping voids of finality. Another piece began with Flight of the Bumblebee flurry and then wavered from mid-tempo contemplation to a bluesy dissonance segment where her right hand felt free to scatter at will. Crescendo, climax, calm wake, then seismometer-worthy Mach 1 boom!

A third sortie gave the accoutrements a real workout, with the piano strings getting a rhythmic knocking, punching, pinching, vibrating and tingling. That grew into a legit rippling jazzy riff that in turn devolved into particles and shards. Some low-end pirouettes gave lyricism to strains of an old blues that was forgotten but was there all the time. Finally, the last number pulled out all the stops, or more precisely, unloaded the whole gadget shopping cart as Courvoisier geared up to peak arpeggio power and melded noise and, oh yeah, notes. It had a lopsided, loopy gait; kind of a stride-akimbo, teetering imbalance that eventually found its legs and, as unadorned piano, flared brightly. Intense rolls, runs and slides; chrysanthemum flourish; sudden stop, and out. There was a brief encore duet with her touring and recording partner, clarinetist Ned Rothenberg. They performed a layered, sensitive peekaboo/hide and seek interplay that featured his extraordinary circular breathing and referenced the earlier coalescence-seeking syntactical togetherness that resided in the heart of her whole customized endeavor.

Following Nights: Epilogue. The Northampton Center for the Arts is not set in 490 CE Marathon, and I did not run home twenty plus miles to Athens, or even my corner of Western Massachusetts, to convey news of a victorious battle — yet my takeaway from this three-prong music marathon, these creative front lines, is just as endearingly momentous. Attaining zero-degrees-of-separation proximity to artists of this echelon is in itself a triumphant privilege. Their poignant commitment to craft, and their zealous shielding of personal inner vision, is resolute enough, by extension, to bolster tribes of attentive listeners.

The Sweet Smell of Success: Jenny Scheinman's All Species Parade

There are many ways to measure success in the jazz world. Financial remuneration, and its related gauge, popularity, is one common metric. Accolades and critical response is another. Other yardsticks of success, like being part of a collaborative community of like-minded artists, and sharing your creative life with appreciative audiences, offer more intrinsic rewards. By all those criteria, violinist and composer Jenny Scheinman is flourishing.

The 45 year old daughter of Humboldt County brought her latest project, All Species Parade, to the Community Music School of Springfield on January 9. Featuring Steve Cardenas (guitar), Julian Shore (piano), Tony Scherr (bass), Kenny Wollesen (drums) and Julianna Cressman (dance), Scheinman’s band was on a three day jaunt through Portsmouth, NH (Jimmy’s Jazz and Blues Club) and New York (City Winery), with a western Mass stop in-between, courtesy of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares.

Touring in support of her recent Royal Potato Family release, All Species Parade, the project is a paean to the Lost Coast, the remote, northern section of Californian coast where Scheinman grew up. The live performance mostly mirrored the material on the album, which is an impressive, fully realized body of work.

The evening opened with “Ornette Goes Home”, a folk-flecked swinger with solo room for everyone, then stretched out for 90 glorious minutes. Each composition had something distinct to say, blending and borrowing from multiple genres without becoming puree. “Shutdown Stomp” was a down-home hoe-down, revealing Scheinman’s honky-tonk fiddler side. “House of Flowers”, a lovely piece with the air of a British isle traditional, featured a delicate melody that highlighted Scheinman’s beautiful tone. The band was expert and brought the written material to life.

Scheinman explained in her introduction that “Jaroujiji” was a Wiyot word that means “where you sit and rest”, and references a place settlers came to call Eureka (“I have found it”). The Wiyot are a small northern California tribe that in 1860 were massacred almost to the point of extinction. Scheinman, who has done extensive research about the region and its history, was moved to hear Jazz Shares Vice President Priscilla Page’s family story. Page’s great-great grandmother, two years old at the time, was one of 100 Wiyots who survived that mass killing on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay.

The band was anchored by bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, who are the rhythm team for Steve Bernstein’s Sexmob and various Bill Frisell ensembles. Their easy rapport put us all at ease. At the post-concert reception, Wollesen shared the story of his grandmother, Rose Thorne, who wrote a dozen songs in the 1920s and 30s that were thought lost in a fire but were recently found. Wollesen arranged and recorded the songs and shared a download code for one of them: “Moon Swing”, featuring Wollesen on vibraphone and the massive bass marimba, which he bought from Scott Robinson (who had two!) Scherr’s bass permeated the elegant Newhouse Hall with a deep luscious sound. He used a bass supplied by the Music School which was in need of some tender loving care. Scherr was gracious about the state of the instrument and resourceful in bringing it up to snuff.

The Jazz Shares streak of confounding medical issues reached three consecutive concerts when Carmen Staaf, who is on the recording, got sick and was unable to play piano. Luckily her husband, Julian Shore, was able to pinch hit at the last minute. He told me that unlike his friends Noah Preminger and Dan Weiss, who delight in throwing musical curve balls at musicians, Scheinman and her band were terrifically supportive as he embarked on a crash course to learn the material. He acquitted himself quite well. His extensive solos on “Shutdown Stomp”, and the as yet unrecorded, “For B”, showed his fluid bop chops and his rapid learning curve understanding the architecture of each composition.

Steve Cardenas is the consummate professional. He has an incisive, unadorned sound and a thorough grasp on jazz guitar history. He was a long-time member of Paul Motion’s Electric Bebop Band, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and multiple ensembles led by Ben Allison. He has recorded extensively as a leader for Sunnyside Records, his most recent being Healing Power (The Music of Carla Bley) featuring Allison and Ted Nash. His work on the evening’s concluding piece, “Song for Sidiki”, written by Scheinman for the Malian percussionist Sidiki Camara, highlighted Cardenas’ innovative take on the west African electric guitar tradition. 

Scheinman has led a charmed life in music. She’s been a regular in bands led by Allison Miller and Bill Frisell, and has toured with Lucinda Williams, Jason Moran, Ani DiFranco and Robbie Fulks. She performed on the original cast recording of Anais Mitchell’s musical “Hadestown”, and has written the score to the movie, “Avenue of the Giants”. Her bandmates are all good friends; it’s clear that relationships matter to her. Scheinman is engaged in the here and now and spent the day of her concert walking to the Connecticut River. She was a gracious bandleader and was clearly having fun on stage. Her playing was confident and easily cut across styles.

All Species Parade is performing at the Big Ears Festival, the Savanah Jazz Festival and the Green Mill (Chicago) in the coming months. She’s also performing in Allison Miller’s multimedia piece, Rivers in Our Veins at 92NY Center For Culture & Arts, and will be at Bombyx on Feb. 4 with Bill Frisell’s In My Dreams. Jenny Scheinman is playing bigger, more prestigious venues these days. The critical acclaim is pouring in and she’s making music of high quality with close collaborators. She’s got success written all over her.