Electric guitarist Jessica Ackerley’s improvisational and compositional skills flourished in the avant-garde jazz scene in New York City, where they played in the duo ESSi and the quintet SSWAN, along with leading the Jessica Ackerley Trio. They also collaborated with free jazz great Daniel Carter on Friendship: Lucid Shared Dreams and Time Travel, which featured in this website’s Best New Releases of 2021. A move to Hawai’i and a blossoming interest in painting further expanded Ackerley’s musical range, as their new LP All of the Colours Are Singing integrates aspects of classical, ambient, and rock. It’s an emotionally resonant, often beautiful work available August 16 through AKP Recordings.
All of the Colours Are Singing is a work of growth, transitions and new possibilities. Ackerley’s move to Hawai’i to pursue a PhD broadened their stylistic palette while also impacting how the aspects of their work that still thrived on improvisation were realized. In short, time was limited and travel was required; the album was recorded in Manoa Valley, O’ahu, Hawai’i in October of 2022 with Walter Stinson on upright bass and Aaron Edgcomb on drums.
The strings, arranged by Ackerley beginning in the spring of 2023 and played by Concetta Abatte on violin and viola, were added to the recording later. Early in the arrangement stage Ackerley’s closest friend in Honolulu was diagnosed with cancer, a circumstance that had an understandable impact on the shape of Ackerley’s arranging. Roughly a week prior to the album’s completion, Ackerley’s friend passed.
The presence of composed strings is immediate, as “Introduction” establishes an ambient and neo-classical approach, though Ackerley’s guitar brings distinctiveness and edge to the meditative atmosphere. The next piece, “Forward motion is never a straight line,” opens with a noirish, almost ’80s Downtown NYC jazziness, with the assertiveness of Ackerley’s guitar ebbing and flowing, always inquisitive, and peaking with a delicious blast of free skronk in the tradition of Sharrock and Ulmer.
“To See Takes Time” (a title borrowed from a comment by painter Georgia O’Keefe) presents something of a guitar trio ballad structure, but it’s appealingly looser that the classic norm. There’s a stretch where it’s just Edgcomb alone and appropriately on brushes, but then Ackerley’s effects-altered guitar flitters back in with a redirection.
A second cyclical guitar pattern emerges and extends into “All of the colours are singing,” as the strings return, figuring prominently and bringing a touch of the neo-classical back with it; but really, Ackerley’s playing is unique to the style and much more robust than is the norm. Reflective? Most certainly. But there is an avoidance of the overly placid. That guitar figure disappears into the mix but returns later in the piece as the stings depart. Giving his toms and bass drum a workout, Edgcomb gets the last word.
“The dots are the connections” sports a spikey trio angularity that supports the cited art-rock influence, but it also feels right to describe the track as jazz-rocky, with the distinction made that it taps into a tradition set forth by Fred Frith. The strings return for the final two pieces, combining beautifully with the cymbal washes in “Nature Morte: Time is Fleeting” and then complimenting the trio’s subsequent unhurried, contemplative progression.
“Conclusion: In Four Micro Parts” is aptly titled, dishing some of record’s most rock-inclined and skronky guitar, initially sans accompaniment, followed by the trio as the strings reenter later and then a final guitar pattern arises. It takes a few listens to All of the Colours Are Singing to fully absorb the achievement, but the way Ackerley blends mood-based textures with a sturdy compositional foundation and improvisational energies is seamless and in turn, pretty miraculous.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
