JJJJJerome Ellis – Vesper Sparrow
With Vesper Sparrow, JJJJJerome Ellis reasserts himself as one of experimental music’s most original voices
"The stutter […] can be a musical instrument,” states Caribbean-American musician and academic JJJJJerome Ellis at the start of his latest record. It’s more than a declaration, it’s a guiding principle that shapes his practice. With Vesper Sparrow, Ellis expands his study into the intersections of Blackness, music, and disabled speech by using granular synthesis (a technique that deconstructs and rearticulates sound) to highlight the unintentional beauty of speech disfluency.
At the core of the album is Evensong, a four-part composition that treats silence as a fertile space for reflection and transformation. This is perhaps best observed in Evensong 2, which closes on an unfinished sentence: 'When I make a piece of music, the music […]', Ellis’s trailing pause creating a clearing into which two standalone compositions emerge. Rooted in the gospel hymn His Eye is on the Sparrow, these tracks draw from Black religious traditions to highlight the healing power of music. They also show that beneath the conceptual rigour of Ellis’s work lies a master of musical feeling, a composer in the same league as Arthur Russell or Julius Eastman. There is poetry in silence, and with Vesper Sparrow, Ellis allows us to lean in and hear it.
Listen to: Vesper Sparrow, Savannah Sparrow (for and after Kenita Miller)