28
Unashamedly avant-garde in her practice, the New York-based guitarist Jessica Ackerley leans heavily on jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composition, and her music is sometimes deliberately challenging or cerebral. But hers is not a closed world: albums like 2019’s A New Kind of Water and 2021’s Morning/mourning borrowed heavily from the aesthetic of ambient music, while elsewhere, she has embraced the harsher charms of post-rock and noise rock. All of these influences are apparent on All Of the Colours Are Singing, which is perhaps her most well-balanced album to date, as well as her most uncompromising.
Her new music is born out of change: it was conceived and recorded between her home city of New York and Honolulu, where she was working towards her PhD. As such, it documents a period of flux, and all the emotions, from elation to trepidation, that go along with major life changes. In addition to these circumstances, her close friend in Hawaii was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently passed away. Ackerley acknowledged the effect this loss had on her music, particularly the string trio arrangements, which were the last part to be completed.
The album kicks off with a shimmering, glassy introductory section, a soundscape of guitar and strings that, in its use of space, resembles the classic Japanese ambient and new-age albums of the 1980s. A nod to Western jazz and rock comes in the form of Aaron Edgcomb’s skittering percussion. Forward Motion is Never A Straight Line is more outwardly jazzy, with Ackerley’s fluid, quicksilver runs of notes backed by rhythmic groove, Walter Stinson’s upright bass doing subtle wonders. The guitar work becomes more pointillist in its execution as the piece progresses, and the drums reply by upping their urgency. Only two tracks in, and it’s already clear that Ackerley knows precisely how to weigh and counterbalance the different elements of a tune. She positions things like an artist adding flourishes of expression or small symbolic details to a painting. This is particularly clear on The Dots Are the Connections, which alternates improvised jazz with tightly controlled sections – the way she moves between the two modes is a feature of her work.
Even the smallest pieces, like To See Takes Time, are executed with perfect timing and with a nuanced control of tone, which at times can be almost bluesy. She allows more visceral elements to colour the title track, which begins with a delicate, high-pitched guitar melody and sweeping strings (Concetta Abatte’s viola doing wonderful things here) before a passage of more free-form playing kicks in. The original guitar motif slinks back in at the end, this time backed by punchy drums. Another function of the strings is to provide a droning ambient backdrop, as on the first part of Nature Morte: Time is Fleeting. Here, we see Ackerley at her most melancholy, and get to experience her impeccable sense of timing. That ability to coerce and cajole time can be seen both in the smallest snippets and over a whole composition: she seems to be able to see the bigger and smaller pictures simultaneously.
The final track, Conclusion: In Four Micro Parts, begins with perhaps the rockiest passage on the album, Ackerley wringing noisy squalls out of her instrument like a jazzier Marnie Stern. There is a sense of breakdown and regeneration here, with a highly experimental mid-section that resolves into something approaching serenity. Cymbals splash, strings soar and swoop, and the guitar finds an almost naive melody. It is as if change has been accepted, and in that acceptance, a more innocent state has been found. In fact, the whole album, despite its many stylistic shifts and variations, feels like a single complete journey. That’s an impressive achievement given the comparatively minimal ingredients Ackerley chooses to work with, and it shows just how deep her talent as a musician, a composer and an improviser runs.
All of the Colours are Singing (16th August, 2024) AKP Recordings.
Pre-order + pre-save ‘All Of the Colours Are singing’ – https://ffm.to/aotcas
Bandcamp: https://jessicaackerley.bandcamp.com/album/all-of-the-colours-are-singing
