JJJJJerome Ellis Turns the Stutter Into Sound on “Evensong, Part 1”

Virginia-based Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist JJJJJerome Ellis introduces Vesper Sparrow with the release of “Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer),” the first movement in a four-part composition that establishes the album’s conceptual core. Arriving November 14 via Shelter Press, Vesper Sparrow continues Ellis’s singular practice of exploring time, sound, stuttering, and Blackness through music. As Ellis explains, the piece searches for connections between stuttering, pollination, and granular synthesis—the audio-processing technique that anchors the composition.

The track opens with a simple but radical assertion: “The stutter can be a musical instrument.” From there, Ellis builds a dense and meditative sound field of hammered dulcimer, flutes, piano, and layered voice. Midway through, spoken-word narration gives way to a sudden deconstruction, as the song’s elements are pulled apart and examined in motion. This “exploded view” exposes the stutters embedded in the composition and directly links them to Ellis’s editing process, affirming the stutter as a force that suspends time and creates openings—sonic and conceptual—for possibility.

Vesper Sparrow expands on Ellis’s ongoing study of how stuttering and music both shape our experience of time. Rooted in Black religious inheritance and Caribbean and Black American musical lineages, the album weaves granular synthesis, spoken word, and atmospheric instrumentation—saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and voice—into immersive soundscapes. Ellis describes the process as sculptural, chiseling away at large bodies of recordings to reveal the final form beneath the surface.

Ellis’s artistic practice is inseparable from their lived experience as a person who stutters. Growing up, verbal expression was difficult, and their performance moniker—spelled “JJJJJerome”—reflects the word they stutter most often: their own name. Though briefly placed in speech therapy as a child, a turning point came in seventh grade with the saxophone. “I still stutter on the saxophone, but it’s different,” Ellis has said. Since then, their work has centered on honoring the stutter through music and examining how both can stretch, fracture, and reshape time.

Now an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Ellis approaches each instrument as a threshold into new sound worlds. Their voice and compositions are guided by reverence for the earth and for ancestors—human and otherwise. With maternal ties to the church and memories of a grandmother who performed as a pianist and organist, Ellis’s growing affinity for keyboards carries deep personal and spiritual significance.

With Vesper Sparrow, JJJJJerome Ellis invites listeners into a practice of attentive listening—where stuttering becomes architecture, time is suspended, and the spaces between silence and sound are filled with care, presence, and self-honoring. Ellis is currently touring in support of the album, following recent performances at the Bienal de São Paulo, Sound & Gravity in Chicago, and Roulette in Brooklyn, with upcoming dates across North America.

Vesper Sparrow is out November 14 via Shelter Press.