Jessica Ackerley’s Interdisciplinary Approach

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

In 2021, Jessica Ackerley left New York to begin a doctorate in composition at the University of Hawai’i. In the preceding months, the guitarist, composer, and improviser worked hard to document their projects—groups SSWAN, MAW, and Petting Zoo, the latter a trio with reedist Yuma Uesaka and drummer Colin Hinton. “That was definitely the most concentrated amount of time that I spent improvising in a collaborative setting with other musicians,” they say over Zoom. One of the most exciting guitarists in avant-garde jazz and improvised music, Ackerley combines classic jazz chops with an openness to sonic exploration that has taken them from delicate acoustics to fuzzed-out skronk, noise-pop to ambient music.