The New Yorker has released an astonishing, must-listen project: The Clearing, a poetic musical rumination on how ‘disfluent’ speech can articulate a new way of living
Please don’t finish JJJJJerome Ellis’s sentences. 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. “Sometimes people just walk away,” he says. “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. “So much of the pain comes from not feeling fully human. Not feeling intelligent. People thinking that I might be evading a question.” This reality is most apparent to Ellis whenever he is stopped by
police. “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.”
Ellis is interested in bringing awareness to this intersection of stuttering (that he also calls disfluency) and Blackness. 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.