Virginia-born Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist JJJJJerome Ellis has built a practice around transforming stuttering into both a subject and a tool of music-making. A multi-instrumentalist, writer, and thinker, Ellis draws deeply from Black religious traditions, personal history, and a reverence for the natural world. Their artistic journey, shaped by saxophone, dulcimer, voice, and electronics, reimagines sound as a way to expand our understanding of time, silence, and possibility.
On November 14, Ellis will release Vesper Sparrow through Shelter Press. The album continues their exploration of the intersections between music, stuttering, and Blackness, weaving spoken word with granular synthesis, saxophone, organ, dulcimer, and electronic textures. Like a sculptor carving away at marble, Ellis slowly uncovered the record from layers of recordings, shaping it into a meditation on time, ancestry, and listening.
The opener of the project, “Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer),” is a four-part composition that introduces the album’s conceptual framework. Opening with the striking declaration, “The stutter can be a musical instrument,” the piece unfolds into a rich soundscape of hammered dulcimer, flutes, piano, and layered voices. At moments, Ellis pulls the track apart, exposing the stutters embedded within the music and revealing them as portals of possibility. In their words: “In the piece I’m searching for connections between stuttering, pollination, and granular synthesis.”
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