JJJJJerome Ellis is a master at creating immersive sound worlds that move between experimental jazz, spoken word, and composition. They work at the intersection of Blackness, disability, and language, treating both sound and orthography as spaces of possibility. Across recordings, performances, and writing, Ellis explores the relationships between voice, time, nature, and divinity, crafting pieces that invite reflection, curiosity, and attentive listening. Their sophomore record, Vesper Sparrow (2025), exemplifies this approach, layering saxophone, organ, dulcimer, electronics, and voice into rich, textured soundscapes. At Rewire 2026, Ellis returns to the festival, performing in Lutherse Kerk – a venue beloved for its capacity to foreground attentive, immersive listening – where audiences can engage directly with the improvisatory gestures, rhythms, and textures that define their practice.

Ahead of Ellis’s performance at the festival, we spoke about the developments in their practice since their last visit in 2022, their explorations of stuttering as both a musical and conceptual tool, and their search for connections between stuttering, pollination, and granular synthesis. We also discussed the interplay between improvisation and recording, and how living in a monastery informs their sense of time, presence, and the ways spiritual spaces like churches and monasteries offer alternative frameworks for listening.

First up, we’re excited to welcome you back to Rewire festival in 2026 after your incredible performance with us in 2022. What have been the most exciting, revelatory, or surprising changes and developments in your practice since your last visit to The Hague?

Thank you so much for putting the time into crafting these generous questions! A big development in my life is that I've been studying singing and growing my confidence in my singing voice. A lot of my life has been spent slowly growing my confidence in my speaking voice and my stutter, so this feels like a new chapter in my journey with my voice. I've also been developing a pipe organ practice, and I'm honored and grateful that I'll be able to play the organ at the Lutherse Kerk.

Your stunning sophomore record, Vesper Sparrow (2025), is a continuation of your ongoing study into the intersections between music and sound, stuttering, and Blackness, through the lens of time. Can you share a bit about using stuttering as a musical instrument, and also about your search for links between stuttering, pollination, and granular synthesis, which you’ve mentioned recently?

My relationship to each of the instruments I play is shaped by the nature of that instrument – its limitations, what it asks of my body, etc. The saxophone's utterances depend on the duration of my breath, and the saxophone demands focus from my lips, cheeks, and lungs. Each instrument feels like a companion, and we forge an ongoing relationship that exists in the space between who we are – who I am as a being and who the saxophone or piano is as a being. My relationship to my stutter feels similar. My stutter feels like its own being, with its own patterns and questions it asks of my body. It too is a companion. I'm ongoingly curious about what we can create together, my stutter and I, the piano and I, etc. 

On the topic of pollination and granular synthesis . . . my dear friend, the artist Mikaal Sulaiman, first introduced me to granular synthesis in spring 2020, through software called CYCLES, created by the sound design studio Slate + Ash. I took to CYCLES as an instrument, and I still feel a powerful spiritual affinity with it. Pretty early on in my relationship with granular synthesis, I had also been thinking about and spending a lot of time with plants. I think time with plants took on special meaning for me in the early pandemic. I started thinking about granular, grain, grains as seeds of grasses . . . and I was thinking about how granular synthesis enabled me to deconstruct and reconstruct past audio. Through granular synthesis, I could travel back in time, so to speak, to the moment I made the music and reshape or remix it on a kind of cellular level. And I wanted to think about these audio processes in relation to pollination and dispersal and forms of rupture that plants engage in. I then got curious to bring these reflections into relation with stuttering and see what might arise.

As your music becomes concretised and – in some ways – frozen in time through the act of recording, how do you maintain a sense of improvisation and chance within that process? As someone with a more considered relationship to time than most in their practice, do you run into any friction while finalising a piece or committing it to tape?

I certainly do feel a lot of friction when committing to tape. I experience a lot of anxiety throughout the processes of editing, mixing, mastering. I fear that what I'm doing with the music is somehow spiritually antithetical with some of the goals I have with music. I feel ambivalent about recording. I love making recordings as a way of documenting what can be fleeting (and of course there are ways of documenting music that don't involve sound recording). But I have other goals in my relationship to music, goals that are tuned to forms of elusiveness and disappearance. But of course I value and love recordings, and so much of my relationship to music is bound up in other people's recordings. Being able to play concerts helps me resist the feeling that the music is frozen in recordings. When I perform, I can feel an aliveness and an un-pin-down-ability in the music. In concerts I almost never try to adhere to the recorded version of a song, and I usually find it pretty easy to give myself permission to keep exploring the song with the audience. 

I admire and consider myself a student of musician Kara-Lis Coverdale, and she teaches me a lot about this question. There's an interview where she talks about differences in how she approaches making records and making live sets. She's taught me how to see those practices as interwoven but also distinct. Sometimes making records can feel to me like making a sculpture or writing a novel, whereas sometimes playing a show can feel like an athletic performance.

At Rewire 2026 you’ll be playing in Lutherse Kerk, one of the festival’s beloved venues for deep, sensitive listening. We understand that you’re currently living in a monastery. Can you share about how religion or spirituality enters into your music, and also about the ways that churches or, indeed, monasteries, might offer different avenues for listening or for experiencing time otherwise?

I live with my wife Luísa, whom I love so much, in Norfolk, Virginia, US. We live in a little house on a creek that we call a monastery. It's not any kind of formal or official monastery, but it's a monastery for us. We call it that because the word "monastery" aligns with the ways we want to practice our spirituality. We're both drawn to aspects of certain monastic traditions. Certain relationships to silence, study, reading, writing, gardening, prayer, attention. I feel very lucky to live here with her. 

My musical practice is many things, but at heart it's a practice of prayer. Prayer to an unknown addressee. I don't know who I'm praying to, and that's a crucial part of the prayer. I was raised in evangelical and charismatic churches in the US and have since left those churches because of political disagreement with some of the teachings. I was taught to pray to a certain conception of God, as a cosmic father, and it feels much better to me to remove this image I've inherited of God and instead pray to an unknown. Music is a primary way I do that. 

There's a lot of overlap between how I feel in the architecture of certain churches and how I feel in the presence of my stutter. When I'm stuttering, I can feel like I'm inside of a chapel. The stutter invites me into a certain form of patience, a certain kind of listening, a certain attention to silence and the unspoken and the unsayable, and a certain intimacy that we're invited into when we're listening to each other with care.

JJJJJerome Ellis performs on Friday 10 April at Rewire 2026. Book now via rewirefestival.nl/tickets