I love the name Big Shrimp. It reminds me of some delightful and obscure band you'd find on a Garden of Delights comp, some overlooked gem like Curly Curve, Pancake, Zomby Woof, or Missus Beastly; a name you’d find in the English prog world of the 1970s, on a bill with Soft Heap, Gravy Train, Matching Mole, or Babe Ruth. In the oft aquatic jam scene, Big Shrimp fits in perfectly alongside handles like Phish, Ominous Seapods, Leftover Salmon, and Oysterhead. It’s also really fun to say.
Big Shrimp is a band of four young guns based out of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Their sheer, unfettered joy to play together is infectious, and they’re clearly intent on world domination. Big Shrimp call themselves hungry, and after seeing them do their thing at Ophelia’s in downtown Albany on April 11, I can confirm it’s the perfect descriptor. There’s something about seeing a pack of feral 20-something-year-olds on a mission that calms any doubt about the future of music.
The band is a spiritual successor to guitarist and vocalist Jared Sage Cowen’s former trio Baked Shrimp, which he founded as a teen in 2017 and dissolved a few years back. Big Shrimp, founded in 2024, brings in bassist Max Perrotti, keyboardist Daniel Cohen, and drummer Henry Thomas alongside Sage Cowen. All of them sing. I sat down with Sage Cowen, Perrotti, and Cohen in the close quarters of Ophelia's green room before the show.
“Every batch of shows are completely different from another one, but a thing that we've really discovered was with Daniel's whole unique sound,” said Sage Cowen. “The way he uses his Moog has added a huge, huge, huge factor to our sound. And Max and Henry have been playing together since they were kids. So those guys already have experience of being locked in together. And also, all four are really solid songwriters, and with this band, too, which is a new thing for me, is we're doing group writing.”
Cohen, a perfect representative of the Charmingly Eccentric Keyboardist Association (see Rick Wakeman, Glenn Gould, Keith Emerson, et al), is enamoured with his Moog Grandmother.
“I try to get the best of what it can do out of it,” he said. “I run it through a bunch of pedals. I have a wah pedal, I have an overdrive pedal, I play around with the LFO a lot. A lot of it is just trying to get it to sing the way a good guitar player could, the way Derek Trucks can make a slide guitar sing. That's what I try to do, just play very expressively, have a little fun, and don't take myself too seriously.”
Sage Cowen – who cites Django Reinhardt, John Scofield, and Jimmy Herring among his guitar heroes – estimates he’s written upwards of 200 songs by himself. Now, with Big Shrimp, all four members can sit down and work out a composition, becoming greater than the sum of their parts through collaboration. The affable Perrotti agrees that the chemistry is undeniable, and has inspired him to aim for higher heights.
“I'm trying to do some big grooves,” he said. “I think Jared has some really banging songs, and I think that Henry also has some really banging songs, and I think those are two very powerful voices in this lineup. And I think that the combination of those two things is really going to become what a lot of this sound is going to be. I do want to play more driven, groove-oriented stuff, and I like what Dan does over the top of it. I don't know if I'm trying to steer it in a direction, per se, but I think that's where I want to go, is some chill grooves that build and build and build and become this massive thing.”
Sage Cowen says he’s struck by the quartet’s ability to listen to each other almost preternaturally as Big Shrimp blasts through changes and pushes jams deep into spacey, explorative zones. It’s an organic and electric energy he’s worried that increasingly common stage tech in the jam scene might neuter.
“We don't want talkback mics ever. I think it would just ruin our flow. When Max changes a key, me and Daniel immediately react with no hesitation,” he said. “If any of the three of us change the key, Henry reacts to it too, in a drum sense. The listening skills in this band are really, really, really good. And every show, it just gets better.”
The thing you need to understand is that these guys are bursting with enthusiasm. They believe in the Big Shrimp mission, and that alone makes you want to get on their wavelength.
Like many smaller fish swimming in the same waters as the big fishes — in this case, Phish — Big Shrimp have faced predictable criticism for wearing their influences on their sleeves.
“There's some unspoken rule that's like, don’t bring up Phish,” Sage Cowen told me. “You know, don't talk about Phish. Like, don't pretend that you've never heard of Phish. It's just so ridiculous.”
Perrotti says they’ve had accusations of being a Temu Phish lobbed at them.
“A lot of times people think it's insulting. They're like, God, oh, it just sounds like 90s Phish. Like, great, right?” he laughed.
From my perspective, being able to channel a beloved band’s most beloved era doesn’t seem like much of a problem. However, for some in the notoriously defensive jam band scene, it’s wrong for a young band to have been influenced by the unavoidably influential Phish, who have reigned dominantly over this little world since the Grateful Dead’s dissolution in 1995. Seems like an easy way to deny yourself a good time to this reporter, and the onstage product I saw in Ophelia’s that night made any attempt to conveniently dismiss the Shrimp lads look silly.
Big Shrimp has secured a major scene booster in Ryan Dempsey, the keyboardist of beloved Vermont jam act Twiddle. Formed in 2004 and on hiatus since 2023, the band is another of Big Shrimp’s touchstones, and having Dempsey open the show and sit in throughout both of their sets was clearly thrilling. It’s not the first time he’s played with Big Shrimp, but the excitement was palpable.
“When I was 17 or 18, man, I went to Twiddle shows. Like, I went to Twiddle shows and I bought Twiddle merch,” said Perrotti. “And it's so cool to be playing a show with Ryan.”
“I just turned 40, so hearing the younger generation, that they're killing it- I mean, they have amazing ideas, their instrumentation, their talent is amazing,” Dempsey told me. “I love Danny's playing, and I love that they're all amazing.”
Dempsey opened the show as his solo act Norbert, beginning with an improvised song about having crabs and closing the set with Sage Cowen - who he met as a teen playing his bar in Burlington years ago - on guitar, playing beloved Twiddle songs together for an appreciative crowd clearly hungry for the hiatus to be over.
He says Big Shrimp’s intense stage presence and ferocious playing that pushes from peak to peak is what sets them apart from the jam band pack.
“I call them musical orgasms,” said Dempsey, a man who seems to thrive on mischief and hijinks. “The climax is there, and I feel it, and the audience feels it. And just watching them on stage, you can tell they're in it too. They don't even know they're playing anymore. They're just like a choir of pure orgasm, just musical notes coming out of their bodies.”
After a few years off the road following almost 20 years of relentless gigging with Twiddle, it’s clear Big Shrimp has awoken something in Dempsey.
“They are really working hard,” he said. “And it's cool to watch, because right now I'm on hiatus, so I'm not doing what they're doing, but I respect it. And their camaraderie is just amazing. They're very, very good people and have a good sense of humor, and it's fun being in their bus and watching them dick around.”
I asked the Shrimp boys about what fictional venue they’d most like to play, and was rewarded with a diverse array of answers. Perrotti opted for the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars; Sage Cowen imagined the band bouncing around on the surface of the moon.
Cohen went in another direction.
“It'd be really, really fun if we had a time machine to go back to, like, I'd say, right around the 1930s or 1920s with those big band jazz groups and be like, 'hey, guys, this is Big Shrimp,'” he pondered. “And just watch the reactions of people. Because, I mean, I'm not trying to say that what we do is anything revolutionary, but like, we've built upon so much music that's come before us, and just it'd be it was so interesting to go back in time and see how an audience of a hundred years ago would react to modern music. Or like, Tool. Imagine someone in the 1920s hearing Tool. I don't know what they would do or say, and that idea interests me.”
It takes a lot of work for a band like Big Shrimp to find ears in the loud, fast-moving 2020s, when clips, social media acumen, and constant production of fresh content is needed to feed the beast. Aden Even-Ezra is the sole crewmember, serving as the lighting tech, sound engineer, roadie, merch person, and whatever else needs to get done over the course of a long Shrimp tour. Throughout their set, he was capturing footage to feed to socials alongside his work behind the soundboard and merch table. Sage Cowen told me that being in a touring rock band is 90% extracurriculars and only 10% actually playing music.
“I'm doing all the video editing and getting that up on time for YouTube, and the booking and all the other extra stuff- It's all handled in-house,” he said. “There's a checklist of everything that has to happen, everything that is required for getting this band on the road and making sure it's a well-oiled machine. It's necessary. It's every single thing- I'm getting the Bandcamps up quickly, getting the setlist recap posts up quickly, YouTube video edits quickly. Everything has to have a quick turnaround time. People's attention spans are really short nowadays. So the long form 20 minute jams, you can't post that.”
Given their obvious musical talent and ability to light up crowds, the band expressed bafflement that they were going viral for things like a video of Cohen complaining about not being served a cheeseburger at a 24-hour McDonald’s at 4 a.m.
“I didn’t hit post on that video, like, 'oh, this is going to go viral,'” said Sage Cowen. “If you try to be like, 'oh, we're gonna do this, this will go viral.' No, it doesn't work. It just doesn't work.”
Despite it all, Big Shrimp remains not only optimistic, but eager to surf the wave of destiny no matter how punishing the chop.
“People say, like, oh, like, the jam scene’s dying or whatever,” Sage Cowen told me. “But I don't think that. I think it's better than ever.”
“I am excited for the future, and I think that we have a good thing here, and I think that the love is here, 100%,” said Perrotti. “These have quickly become like my best friends, and I am so stoked to be able to do this. Even though I'm poor right now, it is completely worth it. The vibes in the van are incredible. So, I think we're in this for the long haul.”
Cohen says being in a touring band, improvising every night across the country, he’s living his dream.
“These four people who are also my best friends, I must say, are some of the best musicians that I've ever played with, and having now spent probably hundreds of hours playing with them, I know their vocabularies, and they know mine,” he said. “It's so cool to develop our own sound and listen back to six months ago, see how much we've grown since then. I'm sure in three years from now, I'm gonna listen back to the show we play today and be like that sucked.”
The show Big Shrimp played that night didn’t suck. For over two hours, they just crushed. I loved the melty jam they got into with opener “Alcaworkholic,” and the main hook from the “Moderation” that followed is still stuck in my head. The Dempsey sit-ins throughout the night were joyous affairs, at one point involving puppetry and the debut of a “What A Wonderful World” cover. The second set kept the energy high, and ended with the Shrimpsters weaving in and out of “Easier to Coast” and “Ollie Blu” in a refreshingly original way. The whole band cooks. Sage Cowen is a tremendously talented guitarist, Perrotti’s bass lines were constantly bubbling and slinking around the beat, Thomas is a machine on the kit, and Cohen’s tireless explorations on the keys display both his versatility and distinctive voice. As promised, Big Shrimp turned on a dime like they shared the same synapses, and were never satisfied with just one peak in a jam.
I thought the band was joking in the green room about working their throat singing on long drives between gigs, but I was delightfully surprised when deep in the show, the Big Shrimp boys did indeed begin making the unmistakable guttural tones of the practice. How can you not be romantic about Big Shrimp?
Their big 2026 “It’s As Shrimple As That” tour continues into June, followed by a series of dates around Phish gigs titled “We’ve Got It Shrimple” from July into early August. The band just announced their debut festival Camp Scampi in Addison, New York, on Aug. 28 and 29. Another Shakedown Beat favorite, Spafford, is headlining the second night.
Take it from me: You want to get on this shrimp boat. No one’s having as much fun as Big Shrimp right now.
