Vesper Sparrow opens with a declaration: “A stutter c-c-can be a musical instrument.” This was an epiphany for the Grenadian-Jamaican-American composer and artist JJJJJerome Ellis, and became the guiding principle of their work. At an early age, Ellis found liberation in the fluid sounds of the saxophone; speaking, by contrast, caused shame and discomfort. Ellis’ stutter manifests as a glottal block, an involuntary pause in their speech. Eventually, Ellis learned to see these pauses as a source of possibility. In a social context, a block can lead to confusion or embarrassment, but in a musical setting that same pause can dilate time, create moments of intimacy, and open avenues for improvisation. Now, Ellis follows their stutter like a path through the wilderness, trusting it like true intuition.
Ellis calls their glottal blocks “clearings,” as in a suddenly open space in the middle of a forest path. Historically, clearings were places where enslaved African Americans could congregate and pray. Ellis explored the complex relationships between Blackness, speech dysfluency, and music on their excellent 2021 debut The Clearing (and in a research paper of the same name). That album—didactic yet inventive, intensely emotional while remaining rigorously intellectual—was like a manuscript bursting with ideas, brought to life with hip-hop, R&B, and jazz. Vesper Sparrow, Ellis’ follow-up, is more focused but just as deep, a prose poem rather than a dissertation. Their focus now is on time: how a stutter can suspend time for both speaker and listener, and how bridging that gap can forge new connections.
Vesper Sparrow has a fraction of The Clearing’s word count, allowing Ellis to show, rather than tell, how their theory informs their practice. Still, a bit of explanation is in order. As in Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room,” another piece that turns a stutter into an instrument, Ellis begins the four-part “Evensong” by telling us how they made it. “I made this music at MacDowell artist residency in spring of 2019. I’m listening to it as I speak,” they say. “The music you’re hearing now I created using a process called [pause] granular synthesis.” The pause is filled with music: ecstatic saxophone, hammered dulcimer, and drifting vocals. Ellis goes on to describe how they split their original recording into snippets of sound called “grains,” and the music demonstrates this by disintegrating into isolated sounds that fall like raindrops at the beginning of a storm. On “Evensong, Part 2” Ellis gathers these grains and rearranges them into a flood—the sax now sailing over waves of distortion—then continues: “When I make a piece of music, the music [pause]...”
The structure of Vesper Sparrow, and the crux of Ellis’ thesis, hinges on that pause. Like the earlier pause, it is filled with music—but this time, the gap comprises two-thirds of the album. The four parts of “Evensong” are interrupted—no, suspended—by two versions of the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” in recognition of Ellis’ upbringing in his reverend grandfather’s church. On the title track, sparse piano accompanies Ellis’ soulful voice as he sings, “Why should I feel discouraged?/And why should the shadows come?” Slowly, tentatively, a saxophone joins, fluttering like sparrows’ wings. On “Savannah Sparrow,” Ellis takes the same hymn and stretches it into a 16-minute pipe organ drone in memory of their grandmother, who played the organ in church; over it, they play a powerful sax solo. Ellis has said that they stutter on the sax, too, which may account for their gripping presence with the instrument; each breath, each click of the keys, feels as patient and considered as a loving conversation.
“...[pause] passes through me. It’s a seed I plant. The seed grows, mostly unobserved,” Ellis says at the beginning of “Evensong, Part 3,” resuming their earlier thought. It’s a simple trick, but it feels like time travelling: The journey that we’ve taken through Ellis’ religious past is contained in a single glottal block. This is the possibility of the clearing as a space for meditation, connection, and prayer. Ellis finishes his explanation of granular synthesis by describing “grains” as pollen, though his grains are carried “not by wind … but by the silence that authorizes and protects all music.” If the structure of Vesper Sparrow is based on a block, so too is the method of “Evensong.” Granular synthesis separates tiny bits of sound with silence, like myriad clearings that introduce infinite possibilities. “Evensong, Part 4” celebrates these possibilities with piano, dulcimer, vocals, flute, and saxophone playing in exuberant loops, savoring every repetition.
Ellis often tells a story to illustrate the potential of a clearing: Once, after they had finished ordering at a restaurant, they blocked when asked to give their name. The cashier simply waited, unbothered, encouraging, caring. Maybe the employee didn’t realize it, but they were performing together, and Ellis’ instrument was their stutter. Vesper Sparrow shows what can happen in such moments: The world slows down, opens up, and becomes a bit more beautiful.
