JJJJJerome Ellis

The work of JJJJJerome Ellis lives comfortably in the gaps between silence and possibility. The Black disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist creates atmospheric soundscapes with saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and their voice. Improvisation is at the core of their artistry – often chipping away at large slabs of recordings to reveal the piece like a marble sculptor. It’s an expansive and interdisciplinary practice that allows JJJJJerome to adapt to any medium or form, including recorded music, live theatrical and performance art, scoring, spoken word and storytelling, and multimedia/visual works that incorporate sound.

Living as a person who stutters, using their mouth to express themselves proved difficult growing up. The practice of spelling their performance moniker “JJJJJerome” stems from the realization that the word they stutter most frequently is their own name. Despite a brief placement in speech therapy as a child, everything clicked when they picked up the saxophone in seventh grade. “I still stutter on the saxophone, but it’s different.” As an artist, their creative ethos now revolves around the exploration of stuttering through music, expounding upon the ability of each to shape time. They honor the stutter through art.

Sophomore record Vesper Sparrow (Shelter Press) is born out of this connection to Black religious tradition and inheritance. It is a continuation of the artist’s ongoing study of the intersections between music and sound, stuttering, and Blackness, through the lens of time. The album is comprised of two complete thoughts, and hinges on a recorded stutter. JJJJJerome splits the four-part composition “Evensong” by fading out the stutter in part two, and sandwiches tracks three and four (“Vesper Sparrow” and “Black-Throated Sparrow”) in-between. “The stutter becomes a structuring moment,” they explain, regarding the opportunity to fill the time opened up.

JJJJJerome’s artistry has been recognized on a wide scale. Their debut record The Clearing (NNA Tapes, 2021) and accompanying book (published by Wendy’s Subway) was awarded the 2022 Anna Rabinowitz Prize for its “restless interrogation of linear time,” as described by esteemed writer Claudia Rankine. Their work has been presented by large cultural institutions, both internationally at the 2023 Venice Biennale and adventurous Rewire Festival; and at home in the US by the Whitney Museum, The Shed, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and National Sawdust. JJJJJerome has additionally been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2015), Creative Capital Grant (2022), and several MacDowell residencies (2019, 2022). Recently, they have been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.

A Virginia native, JJJJJerome currently lives in a monastery on traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA. They live with their wife, poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. earned a B.A. in music theory and ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and went on to lecture in Sound Design at Yale University. With childhood friend James Harrison Monaco, they create vast sonic-storytelling productions as James & JJJJJerome. It’s JJJJJerome’s dream to build a sonic bath house.

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