Vesper Sparrow by JJJJJerome Ellis

For fans of late career John Coltrane, Joy Guidry, Zelienople, dark ambient, and the embrace of the entire self, including those aspects which we’ve been instructed to minimize, Vesper Sparrow by JJJJJerome Ellis leans into the artist’s stutter to create mostly instrumental music structured around this speech pattern. Minimal backgrounds of electronic organs set up a wide acoustic space, gently framing the core sound of saxophone riffs and a mix of sung and spoken vocals. We’ve been inundated with feelgood stories of artists who “overcome” their disabilities through their practice, but JJJJJerome Ellis subverts this expectation by finding ways to deliberately point back to their stutter in their art. Here, the disability appears not as something to be overcome, but instead as a characteristic so inherent as to become inextricable with the self, appearing alongside all the other components of an artist in the immortalized ideal of impressionist art.