JJJJJerome Ellis: Vesper Sparrow review – shape-shifting composer exploits the musical potential of stuttering | Experimental music

In JJJJJerome Ellis’ magical compositions, their bumbling is the guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, and new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores “dysfluency” in the context of black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale University lecturer are intellectually reckless company: in the manner of Alvin Lussier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political resonances of their work. “Stuttering… (cc) can be an instrument,” Ellis declares, before an exhilarating rush of tiny sounds — made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, and voices — spring into existence.

To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundtracks for ambient music, jazz, spoken word, and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis—a process similar to sampling that uses the smallest snippets of sound. These subtle sounds are called “grains,” and Ellis makes much of the earthy, natural connotations of that word: the opening track Evensong, Part One (for and after June Kramer) focuses closely on a handful of sizzling metallic grains before they scatter, root, and then unfurl in waves of dark choral noise.

Ellis grew up in a family of preachers and finds a mirror to their stuttering in religious rhythms and emphases. Interrupting the album’s four-part Evensong is an extended, sparse version of the enduring hymn His Eye is on the Sparrow: Ellis’s saxophone riffs over the soft, warm pipe organ as they slowly unravel the lyrical iterations of gospel and its faith found in the smallest of creatures. A quiet, radical celebration of highly attuned listening, Vesper Sparrow ends by encouraging you to hear it all again, differently: “What new sounds already live in the one sound?”