JJJJJerome Ellis: Vesper Sparrow review – shape-shifting composer taps the musical potential of their stutter

The artwork for Vesper Sparrow by JJJJJerome Ellis.

In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.

To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundscapes of ambient, jazz, spoken word and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis – a process similar to sampling which uses the tiniest snippets of sound. Those micro-sounds are called “grains”, and Ellis makes much of that word’s earthy, natural connotations: opening track Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer) focuses closely on a handful of pinging, metallic grains before they scatter, root, then bloom into washes of dusky, choral noise.

Ellis grew up in a family of preachers and finds a mirror to their own stutter in religious cadences and emphases. Interrupting the album’s four-part Evensong is an elongated, sparse version of the enduring hymn His Eye Is on the Sparrow: Ellis’ saxophone flurries over hushed, warming pipe organ as they slowly unpick the gospel’s lyrical repetitions and its faith found in the smallest of creatures. A soft, radical celebration of deeply attuned listening, Vesper Sparrow ends by encouraging you to hear it all again, differently: “What new sounds already live in the one sound?”