Artists
Downloads
Jan 20, 2026
JJJJJerome Ellis: Reshaping Time
"A stutter… can be a musical instrument," declares Jerome Ellis at the very beginning of his new album, Vesper Sparrow. It's a stark precursor to a beautiful burst of richly layered musicality, where hammered dulcimer and saxophone entwine with murmured melodic chanting. "Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer)" tells you everything you need to know about the depth and breadth of Ellis' experience in music, and yet something different happens here. Ellis starts narrating over the music, explaining where the music was recorded and then diverting the focus to granular synthesis as the undulating waves of instrumentation yield to electronic processing and the reverb turns up.
Ellis' choice to pick apart aspects of his creative process on the creation itself is a stark one, turning his album into a presentation of sorts. In truth, the process was more like a presentation being made into an album. Ellis had undertaken an artist's residency at MacDowell in New Hampshire in 2019, where he recorded much of the instrumentation now heard on Vesper Sparrow. During the pandemic, he was invited by MacDowell to deliver a musical piece to their Summer of Music virtual event, which he decided to present live with accompanying projections showing his in-the-box workings and his own explanations of what was happening with the music.
JJJJJermoe Ellis’ MacDowell presentation
"I had been working in live theater for 10 years leading up to the pandemic with my longtime collaborator and best friend, James Harrison Monaco," explains Ellis. "We would combine live storytelling and narration with live music. In the beginning it was me primarily playing the music and James primarily doing the narrating, but over time we would switch roles."
"I published an essay called The Clearing, that eventually became my first solo album, which is a lot about me trying to explore intersections between music, stuttering, blackness and time. As I had written this essay, and as I started learning Ableton, I got interested in what it would be like to make an audio version of the essay because, of course, stuttering is such an oral experience."
Ellis' stutter is known as a glottal block, in which sounds are caught in the throat. It's a condition that has obviously impacted his life in many ways, but through his creative practice he's foregrounded his disfluency and made it a fundamental part of his musical expression. After releasing The Clearing in 2021, Ellis continued to dig deeper into electronic music production and, specifically, granular synthesis. As he narrates on "Evensong Part 1", the process of slicing sound down to micro samples and rearranging it gave him access to a tool that aligned with his speech.
"One of the reasons I've been drawn to granular synthesis as a method is the ways it allows you revisit, reshape, scramble and pull apart sound and remake moments you experienced in the past. That has a lot in common with my experience of stuttering."
With a background in jazz that still forms the bedrock of his sound palette, Ellis feeds his instrumentation into tools such as Cycles or Granulator to create swirling, abstract soundscapes. There's a natural synergy to his combination of the organic and electronic as he dials granular processes in and out of the recordings from MacDowell that became the source material for Vesper Sparrow. The distinction is also marked out by the split between the four different parts of the piece "Evensong" and the two "Sparrow" themed songs, which are much more plaintive and traditionally-rooted compositions.
JJJJJerome Ellis - Vesper Sparrow (Shelter Press)
"Something that has been important to me from the beginning of using this very powerful tool," says Ellis, "is trying to find a balance between creating something that sounds very digitally manipulated and something that sounds, for lack of a better word, more organic. When I'm working with granular synthesis and I'm trying out something, there are moments where it feels too much like a computer made it. If I'm treating a texture that includes flute in Granulator or in Cycles, of course, I can raise or lower the octaves. When the octave is raised, it goes into this realm that would be impossible to play on a flute. I want it to still feel in some ways connected to the original instrument."
Ellis cites Nicholas Britell's acclaimed soundtrack for Moonlight as influential, where the producer applied DJ Screw's 'chopped and screwed' manipulation techniques to classical scores. The processing — pitch-shifting in particular — is often imperceptible from a surface level listen. At times Vesper Sparrow does bloom outwards with more extravagant sound design, but it's always in harmony with the source material. For Ellis, that's still about respecting where he has come from musically, even when the reverb rains down heavily on "Evensong, Part 2 (for and after James Harrison Monaco)".
Alongside voice and electronics, Ellis performs with saxophone, dulcimer and piano
"My deepest roots are with acoustic instruments as a jazz-trained saxophonist," Ellis explains, "and it's important for me to keep contact with that. Another root that has come retroactively… my parents are from the West Indies and the first music I grew up with was reggae, calypso, soca and dub. It's only as an adult I've come to understand my electronic music practice as being rooted in dub, and the way that music is also very grounded in the acoustic; the voices and the drums and the bass, and using electronic music to shape what those musicians have played. With all the electronic music tools at our disposal, I can get overwhelmed navigating them, but it helps keeping in the forefront of my mind jazz and dub as two of the very strong lineages I try to honor in my work."
"Evensong Part 2" is the track Ellis has chosen to share as a Live Set, giving us access to the component parts of the most outwardly 'electronic' piece on the album. It's a unique insight into the individual elements that have been layered into a swirling composition that reshapes his expressive playing. In essence, his process is a celebration of the ability to manipulate our perception of time — something that rings true with his stutter, which lies at the heart of his music to date.
"One of the reasons I've been drawn to granular synthesis as a method," Ellis says, "is the ways it allows you revisit, reshape, scramble and pull apart sound and remake moments you experienced in the past. That has a lot in common with my experience of stuttering. A typical rhythm of meeting someone and introducing yourself, which usually goes by very quickly, gets reshaped. The stutter introduces its own rhythm, and extends and shapes the moment in a different way."
In his day to day existence, these moments of time distortion can lead to misunderstanding and difficulties for the unprepared, but when embraced and adopted as tool, Ellis' stutter also creates a butterfly effect of alternative possibilities where once there was the everyday. It's a particular case that lends itself to the practice of listening to, and making, experimental music.
"When uncertainty is introduced, what do we do?" Ellis ponders. "For me, experimental music is a school for how to listen with generosity."
Follow JJJJJerome Ellis on his website, Instagram, and Bandcamp
Text and Interview: Oli Warwick
Photos: Robert Franklin, Bailey Holiver