JJJJJerome Ellis is one of those artists who is comfortable drawing from a huge range of musical traditions without being fully aligned with any of them. Those traditions – free jazz, improv, modern composition, musique concrète, sound art, gospel, environmental music – seem to bounce off Ellis and land in unexpected positions. In part, this is due to their entirely unique approach to expression: Ellis stutters, and rather than working against the stutter, they choose to frame it as a central aspect of their musical identity. This means that you are likely listening to something removed from your own everyday experience, and indeed from your experience of music as a whole.
Crucially, Ellis’s stutter is not limited to their vocals but extends to their primary instrument. They frame it as a positive aspect of their musical practice: ‘I still stutter on the saxophone, but it’s different.’ In practical terms, this means that Ellis has developed a playing style that is different from that of his influences, heavyweights of the game like John Coltrane. Artistically, the idea of interruption and the need to fight to express oneself permeate the whole of Vesper Sparrow, Ellis’s second album, even when they are playing dulcimer or keys or electronics.
The album is, in fact, structured as an interruption. The first two tracks and the last two make up a quartet called Evensong – the title a callback to Ellis’s grandmother’s role as a church organist – while in between are two long, exploratory pieces. Evensong’s first part takes an initial melodic minimalism and layers it up to maximal effect. There is a self-reflexive but also very useful description of how Ellis obtained this effect through their use of granular synthesis. It’s the musical equivalent of breaking the fourth wall, or rather, a questioning of whether the fourth wall even needs to exist. It places Ellis beside or within the listener, strengthening the collaborative bonds between artist and consumer. The second part of Evensong is a gorgeous demonstration of granular synthesis in practice, moving from delicate, pointilist notes to enveloping washes of electronic and organic sound.
After the break in the middle, part three picks up the thread of the first half, comparing the making of music to the reproduction and growth of flowers, and in doing so situating the work in a wider natural world. The music here is a fitting mix of organic and synthetic sounds. The fourth part, essentially the album’s finale, is a joyous jazz-folk trip, full of flighty, Harold McNair-like melodies. Like McNair, Ellis has Caribbean heritage, and those roots show through here and there in unexpected ways.
The central pieces are, if anything, even more extraordinary than the quartet that surrounds them. The title track, beginning with a loose, improvised piano, is gently expansive, questioning, finally joyful. ‘I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,’ Ellis concludes, the vocal a strong, sweet sigh, somewhere between Nina Simone and Eric Chenaux. Savannah Sparrow, at well over a quarter of an hour in length, takes us further into the realms of free and spiritual jazz, the sax treading a delicate but ultimately confident path through softened organ notes, displaying moments of melodic beauty and quiet patches that quiver with expectation. The tone is meditative, philosophical, sometimes elated and, when Ellis’s vocal part comes in, tinged with self-doubt, and the whole piece feels like a high-wire act performed in a dream.
JJJJJerome Ellis is an enviably talented musician, and just two albums into their career, they have already developed an entirely singular musical identity. Vesper Sparrow communicates in a way that makes us stop and think about our own modes of expression. We emerge with a new understanding of how beauty and truth can be conveyed in unprecedented forms, and how form itself can be manipulated to become art rather than simply structure.
Vesper Sparrow (November 14th, 2025) Shelter Press
Bandcamp: https://jjjjjerome.bandcamp.com/album/vesper-sparrow