Solo guitar can be a lonely thing, made lonelier by the ineluctability of the present. We employ strategies to overcome this loneliness; we delay things, loop them, reverberate. We can talk to ourselves. We try to read the room. We try to ask the walls a question to which they can’t help but reply.
Jessica Ackerley’s approach to solo guitar is not lonely. In her work I hear the solo performer’s capacity for connection actively fighting that aesthetic of loneliness. She is constantly in dialogue with her influences, her heroes, her friends. This particular record was forged in relation to Ackerley’s former mentors, the great guitarists Vic Juris and Bobby Cairns. She mourns for them. They sing back to her.
Hearing their histories in her approach makes this document feel intimate, like hearing one side of a conversation. Her conversational partners are occasionally audible, but always resonant. They can be convivial, the ancestral image of a guitar on a porch. They resonate silently, and indirectly, referentially guide her. One is her guitar student, Henry. Another is the great guitarist Tashi Dorji, an interview with whom inspired the title for her improvisation, “Departure into Sound Memory.” The most obviously resonant partners are Vic and Bobby, whom Ackerley is reaching for.
But it is not about them, not really. This record comes from these relationships but it’s not about them. Nor is it about the vitality in her technique, the peculiarities of her language. It’s not about how she rebuffs an aesthetic of icy clarity in favor of a lived image. Strong hands thawing over a fire. It’s about that strange world that opens up in the moments between being a student and being a teacher. It’s an audible inquiry into genealogy. This music asks where we place ourselves in relation to our influences, our heroes, our friends. Such a personal language requires that kind of an ecosystem. Any distinct, original, personal statement is heavily marked by the voices of the living and the dead. It’s rare to be able to hear these voices so clearly.
credits
released May 28, 2021
All tracks produced, recorded and written by Jessica Ackerley.
Recorded in Manhattan, NY
Mixed and mastered by Lucas Brode
Art and scores by Jessica Ackerley
Photography by No Land
Layout by Dave Petersen
Liner Notes by Wendy Eisenberg
2021, Cacophonous Revival Recordings
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contemplative, introspective music. Patrick is one of the leading players in the avant garde and experimental jazz scene on the west coast. His catalogue is prolific, so dive in! Jessica Ackerley
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