The Clearing the debut album by JJJJJerome Ellis is one of the records I have thought about most over the past few years, for its standout musical qualities, for the strength of the voice it introduced and for what those things together entailed, honing in on a particular facet of music while crystallising its force as a communicative tool.
From the blues legends B.B. King and John Lee Hooker to Bill Withers and Carly Simon for instance – all stutterers, with Hooker the man ‘who can’t talk worth a damn’ the author of the ‘Stuttering Blues’ – and from say Van Morrison on songs like ‘T.B. Sheets’ and ‘Cyprus Avenue’ to the technique of flutter-tonguing on a wind instrument or the beats of so much hip hop and dance or electronic music, notably the genres of stutter house and turn-of-the-century glitch, stuttering occupies a central not marginal place when it comes to the rhythms and practices of music, in league with syncopation, characteristic of the unmastered recording, a potential means for controlling desire and expectation, a way to divide the lyric or metre or pulse.
That is to say that stuttering or the things we might associate with stuttering – like repetitions and long silences, unexpected and anticipatory pauses or prolonged sounds – seem totally native to music whether we are talking about instrumental percussion or beatboxing, glitches and scratches, flutters and growls or the setup and nature of music as a site of emotional release. Stuttering as an actual speech disorder on the other hand is still typically seen as something which the aspiring musician and certainly the aspiring singer must overcome.
The composer, multi-instrumentalist and self-described stutterer or disabled artist JJJJJerome Ellis sought on his breakthrough record The Clearing to frame speech dysfluency and especially stuttering as ‘a space for possibility rather than pathology’. Blending jazz with experimental electronics as he played the tenor saxophone, flute, hammered dulcimer, piano and synthesizers while utilising electronic patches and drum and bass programming, taking the loop as his organising principle and guiding listeners through the process through his lilting and apposite spoken word, he based the album around a setting of a 2020 essay he had published in The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and by way of a mission statement summarised his thesis:
that Blackness, dysfluency and music are forces that open time. Opening brings possibilities: temporal refusal, temporal escape, temporal dissent.
Deliberate rupture then through plainspoken and spectral utterances, soaring saxophone, roiling keys and staggered bass lines, on The Clearing the artist also offered up a compelling history through a series of watery etymologies, noting that the sixteenth-century French writer Guillaume Bouchet once suggested that proximity to flowing water might cause someone to stutter while comparing the Latin words ‘balbus’ for a stutterer or stammerer and ‘babulus’ for a babbler or fool. While these words might help us think about music too in the abstract, in his essay and on The Clearing he drew a limpid, shimmering line between the eighteenth-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and contemporary authors like Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott to suggest that dysfluency might be in kinship with the ruptures and rhythms and waters of the transatlantic slave trade and Black experience too.
Ellis followed The Clearing with Compline in Nine Movements, a piece of piano music by turns pensive and garrulous which he recorded back in 2017 in one long take, developing a theme from the Piano Tales which he has performed in collaboration with James Harrison Monaco, a storytelling show which posits a woman on her death bed and invites the audience to choose which tales she will hear in her final hour by selecting a trio of objects from a small trunk.
Still this new record Vesper Sparrow is billed as Ellis’s sophomore effort, and feels somehow more fragmentary than The Clearing despite picking up sonically largely where that album let off. Ellis uses a similar combination of hammered dulcimer, tenor saxophone, piano, pipe organ and electronic processes while giving a freer reign to his singing voice as the Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist whittles down stretches of improvisation and bids each listener to reconsider the essence and structure of what they are given to hear.
Vesper Sparrow also feels more intimate and personal than The Clearing even as the opener ‘Evensong, part 1’ entails a depiction of process whose details and spurts might call to mind something between a YouTube how-to video, a PowerPoint presentation and the debut Books album of obscure samples or ‘folktronica’ in their acclaimed and decidedly of-the-moment breakout Thought for Food.
‘A stutter can be a musical instrument’ the artist begins as ‘Evensong, part 1’ introduces its thicket and swirl of incessant dulcimer plucks and plaintive saxophone calls. With electronic smears transporting us between diffuse thoughts and moments, Ellis explains ‘I made this music at MacDowell artist residency the spring of 2019 . . . I’m listening to it as I speak’ and concludes:
the music you’re hearing now I created using a process called . . . granular synthesis . . . using my computer, I took the recording I made at McDowell and split it into tiny snippets of sound . . . called grains. I can rearrange these grains to make new music.
Duly separating the lavish throb of his soundscape into oversaturated bars or fractures of noise, the second track ‘Evensong, part 2’ eventually finds its flow with the tenor saxophone the most resonant and declarative and emotional voice amid a restless whir of electronics, until a pounding late-night drum beat kicks in. ‘When I make a piece of music’ Ellis says, emerging from the woozy, soulful and almost neon-clad atmosphere which might find itself well at home in an AraabMuzik production, ‘the music . . .’ only the expression to complete the thought doesn’t transpire.
Formally then Ellis uses this stutter or ellipsis to separate what he describes as two ‘complete thoughts’. His evensong fades out and we get the two long sides of ‘Vesper Sparrow’ and ‘Savannah Sparrow’ before the album concludes with evensongs parts three and four. Each track on the album is dedicated ‘for or after’ a fellow artist, in turn June Kramer, James Harrison Monaco, Kenita Miller, Jessica Valoris and okcandice with the title track ‘Vesper Sparrow’ the sole exception, probably because it is the only composition to feature other performers.
And from the steep washes and dense walls of sound which characterised the first two tracks, ‘Vesper Sparrow’ takes what is at first a more furtive and oblique course with a gauzy palette put together by a group of collaborators including Haruna Lee on flute, James Harrison Monaco on piano and Ronald Peet and S T A R R (busby) on vocals. The album notes suggest that Ellis dreams of building a sonic bath house, a concept which certainly jives with this type of music, daubed and misty without desiring the sonic detail say or the weighty materiality or olfactory quality of the Bathhouse Blues by Jake Muir.
This vaporous opening soon dissipates to leave us with Ellis on solo piano and voice. Approaching a falsetto with a kind of hushed or intimate yet piercing emotional quality which is redolent of Tom Krell of How To Dress Well, he wonders in impassioned tones ‘Why should I feel discouraged?’ and ‘When is my portion a constant friend?’ as the odd waft or trill from his tenor saxophone and a faint percussive metronome – as if padded out on the surrounding furniture – tempers or consoles his creed. Elliptical and sorrowful but still yearning, as Ellis sings ‘the eye is on the sparrow’ it is possible to think of the caged birds of Maya Angelou or the Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore.
‘Vesper Sparrow’ dissolves into a wash of distortion while ‘Savannah Sparrow’ begins with a crude laugh and the whirring of a pipe organ, over which Ellis layers the muffled register of his tenor sax. Padding out a melody, he steadily attains a fuller tone. Noting that his vocation as a musician essentially began when he started to improvise along to John Coltrane and Billie Holiday records, Ellis on the tenor saxophone carries the lyrical mournfulness of say a Ben Webster or even Stan Getz while possessing a sparer manner and a full and fuzzy tone. At the same time he attributes his current affinity for keyboards to old tales of his grandmother, who once performed as a pianist and organist, as well as his enduring maternal family ties to the church.
The two long tracks ‘Vesper Sparrow’ and ‘Savannah Sparrow’ which make up the core of the album are named for the New World sparrows which inhabit the grasslands of North America. Both with crisp brown streaks, the vesper sparrow is characterised by the thin white ring around its eyes and a penchant for twilight song, its slurred whistles ending in a series of descending trills while the savannah sparrow’s song carriers a buzzier quality which perhaps explains Ellis’s use of an organ drone.
Through whorls of saxophone, Ellis on ‘Savannah Sparrow’ plays a low drone and vamps in the flutes of his pipe organ, letting the instrument hold centre stage before those moody stops and a few swells from his tenor channel into an iteration on the lyrics from ‘Vesper Sparrow’, now sung in a much lower pitch with a deliberate slur or drawl.Ā It’s soulful and starkly folksy in a way that stretches from Stevie Wonder all the way to June Tabor, on a composition which offers a stirring combination of spiritual jazz at its lowest ebb and solitary church music, with ‘Savannah Sparrow’ finally drawing to a close after sixteen enthralling minutes through the vestigial strains of his organ and the drifting sighs of his sax.
Shocking then that from this state of plaintiveness and quietude, we return to Ellis’s evensong through a sudden blurt of haunted house atmospherics. ‘It’s a seed I plant’ he begins, back to his spoken word and a dizzying blend of neo soul with musique concrĆØte, soon explaining to the listener the function of anthers which are ‘the part of the flower that houses pollen’. When he uses granular synthesis, Ellis says:
it’s as if the anther opens, releases the pollen. The sound is carried . . . not by wind or water or mason bee or ruby-throated hummingbird, but by the silence that authorises and protects all music.
And ‘what new sounds already live . . . in the one sound?’ he wonders as we transition from ‘Evensong, part 3’ to ‘Evensong, part 4’ the album closer, a soulful and ringing climax or partial comedown, a final flowering which communes with the earth through a profusion of keys and hammered dulcimer, a plaisant topline of flute and syncopated handclap percussion.
