Both musically, but also how we are learning.” We are able to experiment, able to be vulnerable, able to improvise together.
#THAT ONE STUTTERING SONG FREE#
“One of my goals as a teacher is to create a space where we feel as free as we can. I love it,” says Ellis, who now works in the sound design programme. “I just started teaching at Yale this fall. He has presented work at the Lincoln Center and has been the subject of a This American Life episode. In 2011, he obtained a BA in music theory and ethnomusicology from Columbia University and in 2015, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to research samba in Salvador, Brazil. By the age of 13, Ellis began playing the saxophone. On the album, I wanted to embrace that kind of interweaving of speech and music.” His grandfather also introduced him to opera and classical music, while his father showed him “reggae, and calypso and soca”. Sometimes he would explicitly break into song, and the peaks and valleys of his speech were so dramatic. “When he preached, it was so intensely musical. “He was a reverend and had a storefront church in Brooklyn,” he recounts. His earliest memories are of playing music at church with his late grandfather. “I grew up in a very Christian household,” he says. His mother is Jamaican and his father is Grenadian. That felt very liberating.”Įllis was born in Connecticut, but was raised in Virginia Beach. I have the opportunity to score my own stutter. “On the album, I feel safe stuttering because it’s just me. The album captures these blocks in a way that turns them into their own instrument or artistic material he isn’t ashamed of his disfluency and asked for his stutters to be acknowledged in these interview quotes. “I had some sounds that I had been making in Ableton with piano, saxophone, flutes and trap-influenced drums.” Ellis has a glottal block – his stutter isn’t in stammered syllables but rather silences caught in the throat (try saying “uh oh” but not being able to go beyond the “uh”). Once he finished the essay, he began experimenting musically. In Ellis’s poetic but political artwork, disfluency instead becomes a means to exist outside of ordinary time, as defined by a white-dominated world. How slave masters deliberately did not let enslaved people own, as a way o-o-of domination and control,” says Ellis, who wanted to find the connective tissue between this history, and how ableism disadvantages people with speech impediments because they don’t adhere to certain flows of time. “I was interested in the role that clocks and watches played o-o-on plantations in the antebellum south. It first started life as an essay in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and later transfigured into a musical voyage. It weaves personal narratives, such as the audio of a bookseller hanging up the phone on him after he can’t get his words out, with historical accounts such as a story of enslaved Africans overcoming their captors via music. His latest project The Clearing is a profound and richly textured 12-track album with an accompanying book, that blends spoken word and storytelling with ambient jazz and experimental electronics to create a soundscape that is both meditative and theatrical. “I don’t want my Blackness to come off as a threat and I don’t want my stuttering to come off as evidence of lying.”Įllis is interested in bringing awareness to this intersection of stuttering (that he also calls disfluency) and Blackness. People thinking that I might be evading a question.” This reality is most apparent to Ellis whenever he is stopped by police. “So much of the pain comes from not feeling fully human. “Perhaps because I didn’t adhere to t-t-the choreography t-t-that we are often used to.” These kinds of experiences have left him feeling extremely vulnerable, he tells me candidly over a video call. “Sometimes people just walk away,” he says. The New York composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and writer, who has a stutter – hence the repetition of Js in his name – asks for patience from whoever he is in conversation with. P lease don’t finish JJJJJerome Ellis’s sentences.