Jessica Ackerley has been enjoying a very busy summer. In June and July, they embarked on their very first European tour (with pianist Eli Wallace) and spent a few weeks in late July and early August as a composer fellow with the experimental music collective Bang on a Can at MASS MoCA in Western Massachusetts, culminating in the organization’s LOUD Festival on 1-3 August. As if that weren’t enough, Ackerley’s latest solo album, All of the Colours Are Singing – possibly their most ambitious yet – is set for a 16 August release.
Ackerley’s combined love of music and visual art informed the composition they prepared for the Bang on a Can event. “The piece that I composed for it is part of a larger series that I just started recently, trying to integrate my visual art background with my compositional practice,” Ackerley said from a video call while on a break during the MASS MoCA program a few weeks ago. “The music I’ve been writing starts as a graphic score based on automatic drawings similar to the way the surrealist painters did in the 1940s, with improvising drawing and sketching in an abstract way to let go of any premeditated ideas and letting the subconscious flow through visual imagery onto the page. This has been challenging because it’s the first time I’ve done it for a large ensemble.”
The guitarist/composer, who was born and raised in the small town of Airdrie, in Alberta, Canada (just outside of Calgary), took up guitar at age 15, studying at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, and St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Jazz Guitar Performance. They then moved to New York City, enrolling in Rutgers University and earning a Master’s degree. While in New York, they immersed themselves in the jazz and experimental music scenes, collaborating with an eclectic array of musicians and ensembles.
During their time in New York, Jessica Ackerley released a stunning volume of records in a variety of configurations – a casual gaze at their discography includes jazz trio releases under her own name (Coalesce, A New Kind of Water), collaborations with jazz saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi (Extremities) and Uruguayan guitarist Federico Musso (Nervios calavera en roja cinta en una noche en bruma gualda), a record with drummer Rick Daniel as part of the noise-rock duo ESSi (Vital Creatures), in addition to a solo guitar recording (Morning/mourning) and a collaboration with free jazz saxophone legend Daniel Carter (Friendship: Lucid Shared Dreams and Time Travel) that were recorded in New York but not released until they moved to Hawaii in 2021.
“My husband was burnt out on New York, and I was getting sick all the time with sinus infections,” Ackerley explains. “I didn’t think I could sustain working with that kind of chronic illness long-term, so we were already talking about leaving, but not for another several years. When the pandemic hit, all of my guitar students from my guitar studio went online, and that was the security that we needed with job stability to make the jump.”
Jessica Ackerley liked the idea of learning how to compose and going back to school for something that wasn’t jazz or improvisation-based, so they began pursuing a PhD in Composition at the University of Hawaii. “I think I was ignorant in the sense of how dramatic of an impact it would have on my trajectory with the opportunities that have come to pass the last two years. For example, the Bang on a Can fellowship is a really big deal for a composer, and if I was still in New York, I probably wouldn’t be doing that. The PhD program really allowed me to go off and do these residencies, and to tour a lot more, because I have my graduate stipend. Universities also have lots of resources in terms of funding.”
The doctorate program has also greatly inspired All of the Colours Are Singing, expanding Ackerley’s musicianship in very surprising and unexpected ways. “I always wanted to lead a core trio, something that was my project, with my music, that I could work with and present, both in recorded and live format,” they said. The inspiration for adding strings to the core trio was due to their interest in ambient music, a rather unsurprising development once you hear Across Water, their stunning 2022 ambient collaboration with Shiroishi. In the album’s liner notes, Ackerley refers to the new album as “a musical parallel to the state of flux and massive transitions in my life during the past three years.”
“I got really obsessed with Brian Eno, particularly his Atmospheres and Soundtracks album,” Ackerley explained. “I love the lushness and the way he sculpted the sustaining swells. With guitar pedals, you can create those sustains and those swells, but with strings, they just have this very emotive texture and element to them. I wanted to see if I could use that in the context of a modern jazz trio, and kind of draw on those ambient elements, juxtaposed against improvisation and composition in a modern jazz context. It feels like the two worlds might not merge, but I was up for the challenge.”
All of the Colours Are Singing – which consists of Ackerley on guitar, Walter Stinson on upright bass, and Aaron Edgcomb on drums, was also largely inspired by Ackerley’s experiences with painting. “I experience a lot of synesthesia,” they explained. “In terms of when I listen to music, there’s a lot of visuals occurring in my head. I want to make the kind of music that would sound the way I experience visual soundscapes in my head. I would listen to a lot of string-based music while painting, so I think that through osmosis, that was sort of absorbed into the music when writing this album.”
The strings were all performed by Concetta Abbate, recorded in her hometown of New York City, as Ackerley notated what they wanted her to play. “The challenging thing about recording strings remotely over top of a trio,” Ackerley explained, “is that there’s intonation stuff that is always going to be a problem because you’re not in the same room together to correct the pitch, so there’s some pitchy stuff on this album. But I didn’t obsess over it too much because it has a little bit of a punk element to it. I love the DIY aesthetic of not striving for perfection.”
Compared to some of their more structured compositions, Ackerley said that the direction they gave Stinson and Edgcomb was very loose: “Basic melodies were written, basic form structures in terms of sections that we would play going into other sections, but there is also a lot of freedom in terms of how it could be interpreted as well. As someone who is also a free improviser, I love the looseness and spontaneity that come from freely improvised music, so I wanted to draw on that as well. Really open-ended solos, where you aren’t stuck to the structure of the melody as an improvisation base, in terms of form.”
Ackerley plans to tour with Stinson and Edgcomb in the fall, playing on the west coast of the US as well as parts of Canada (a tour of Japan and Korea is in the works for 2025). Going back to their home province of Alberta is something they’re particularly interested in from a collaboration standpoint. “There’s some exciting stuff happening with the local musicians there, such as Mustafa Rafiq and Jairus Sharif,” Ackerley said. “Because of its location, and because it’s the most conservative province in Canada, Alberta is often pushed to the wayside in terms of its contributions to Canadian music. One of the important things for me as a native Albertan who went off and developed this international career is to go back home and reconnect and establish myself through collaboration with local musicians that are doing exciting stuff.”
Despite an impressive catalog of music released under their own name, Ackerley thrives on collaboration, whether in a duo configuration, a jazz trio, or a full band. What they look for in a solid collaboration is relatively consistent across all projects. “I want to kind of bridge the worlds between musicians that haven’t come from formal training versus the musicians that have,” Ackerley said, “and find a middle ground where we can work together and collaborate. For example, in ESSi – Rick (Daniel, the drummer) didn’t go to school for music, but his musicality and his natural talents allowed us to kind of shape this really interesting sound as a band.
Despite their constant commitment to learning and their vast amount of formal training, Jessica Ackerley insists that a lack of formal training can often be a good thing, “The musicians that I like to listen to,” they said, “like David Bowie, Brian Eno, Jimi Hendrix – basically the pillars of modern music – they didn’t go to music school, and they figured it out, and they made some of the most brilliant, life-changing stuff ever. I’m fearful that in these more formal structures, that might be lost in the long term.”