Stuttering, Blackness, and Music with JJJJJerome Ellis, Part 2

Blackness, stuttering, music, and religion are all complex topics in their own right. Yet, Jerome Ellis combines them beautifully in his work, like when he uses academic and theoretical language to parse out the relationship between blackness and music.

In the second part of our interview with Ellis, we talk more about his album, The Clearing, and how he draws out the beauty of stuttering through various mediums – history to show the connection between music and blackness, and comparing waiting birds and trees to the unknowingness of stuttering.

“If I were...if I were repeating the first syllable of a book title than they...then [people] would be less likely to hang up because they would hear like, and they might be like – Oh, he's stuttering right now – but, because [my] glottal block so often sounds silent...people don't know what's happening, and...it's been so painful for so many years, but I gradually I’ve been able [to see there is something important there] in the not knowing.”

Other topics include:

• How Blackness and stuttering play next to each other
• Historical knot of blackness and music
• Mosaics of difference
• Voluntary and involuntary stuttering
• Herons and stuttering
• Honoring the mystery and beauty of the stutter
• Stuttering and the state of unknowing
• Tress and stuttering
• Glottal block stuttering vs. repeating syllables in TV and film
• “Stuttering is an occasion to be present in complex thought”

Mentioned in the episode:

• “We do not live single-issue lives” - Audrey Lorde
• Historian Saidiya Hartman
• Track 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 of The Clearing
• History of the word grallatorial
• This American Life episode featuring Jerome
• “The Cloud of Unknowing”
• Jerome’s forthcoming projects

Upcoming Live Performances:

• April 10, 2022: Rewire Festival in The Hague, Netherlands
• May 7, 2022: XJAZZ! Festival in Berlin, Germany
• July 2022: Performances at Haus Der Kunst in Munich, Germany

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