JACOB COLLIER: You’ve Done So Much
An interview by Tim Gruar.
Jacob Collier has collaborated with Hans Zimmer and Herbie Hancock, performed a TED Talk, a BBC Proms concert, and with Pharrell Williams at Coachella 2017. He’s composed music for Dreamworks’ animated film Boss Baby, is commissioned as an arranger for bands and orchestras worldwide, and teaches Masterclasses as he tours the globe.
Tim Gruar recently had the opportunity to have a bit of a chat with Jacob about his heady rise, creating a 50 song album series, and playing with Herbie Hancock.
Collier recently clipped his ticket again when he scooped up a major gong at this year’s Jazz FM Awards in London. That was after winning two Grammy’s and a host of other awards. At only 24-years-old, he’s the youngest ever recipient to get the award. Upon winning he received a personal video message from one of his mentors, producer extraordinaire, Quincy Jones.
“Wow! I say, 24! At that age, I was still having trouble finding my way to the Student Union building. You’ve done so much!”
Collier just laughs it off. “Yeah. Well, I still have days like that too. I guess I’ve really extended myself. But you can do that if you have the vision. Because I made everything in my own home studio, I could do it all on my terms. I wasn’t restrained by others, or their limitations, just my own imagination.”
And what an imagination it is! For instance, for his latest record Djesse (Vol 2), he takes a simple cover of the classic Moon River and samples his own voice over 5000 times to create an ultimate clone-choir, with Collier singing every part and every note. This is grand stuff, I venture. On par with the choirs of Westminster Abbey and the work of ambitious composers like Anne Dudley. “Thank you. But this is just one song. And one style. I’m not tied down to any particular genre. I wanted to create music of every type possible.”
And he’s already well on his way to achieving that. The young self-taught musician made a huge splash via YouTube with his homemade multi-tracked film of cover versions of Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry ‘bout A Thing, featuring multiple vocal parts and Collier playing every instrument. It’s like Bobby McFerrin on acid! That video went viral and launched his career.
In 2014, Collier hit the jackpot, signing to Quincy Jones’ management company giving him the confidence to embark on his insanely ambitious one-man, audio-visual live show.
Since then he’s ventured out and now his style fuses not only clever vocals but elements of jazz, a cappella, groove, folk, electronic music, classical music, gospel, soul and improvisation. All presented with his trademark extreme vocal reharmonization.
Looking back you could say Collier was always going to head down this path. “Yeah, well, I guess I did have that grounding.” Growing up in North London, he tells me, Collier attended The Purcell School for Young Musicians in Hertfordshire and later studied jazz piano at the Royal Academy of Music. Not surprisingly, he came from a musical family. “My mum is a music teacher, violinist, and conductor at the Royal Academy of Music.” His maternal grandfather was also a renown violinist who performed with orchestras around the world. Music was always front and centre in his family: “We’d sing Bach chorales together as a family – it’s just so much fun.”
Not content just to play music, Collier was also a child actor, performing under his birth name, Jacob Moriarty (Collier is his maternal Grandmother’s name) portraying Tiny Tim in Arthur Allan Seidelman’s A Christmas Carol (2004) and performing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. The latter heavily influenced his usage and understanding of harmony. “That was a revelation. My mind was blown away by what you could do with the human voice.” That made him a self-declared autodidact. He started making an uploading homemade, multi-instrumental content to YouTube in 2011, releasing, among others, vocal arrangements of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ and ‘Pure Imagination’ (from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971).
On 1 July 2016, Collier released his debut album, In My Room, which was entirely self-recorded, arranged, performed and produced in his home in London. In February 2017, Collier was awarded two Grammys for his arrangements of Flintstones and You And I, both from the album.
At the beginning of last year, Collier began work on his most challenging project, Djesse (Vol 1- 4), an ambitious four-volume, 50-song album. “It’s a “journey through every musical genre under the sun. Well, that’s what I call it.” It features more than two dozen artists and ensembles. The first quartile, Djesse Vol. 1, dropped in December 2018; and the second, Djesse Vol. 2, was released in July. That alone proves his workload is incredible!
“Yeah. It sounds almost impossible, almost bordering on the ridiculous, to try and do this, because, it was my intention, and still is to release a four-volume set within a year and a half! Fifty songs” All of these volumes are different, all extensions of Collier’s master plan. “They are their own little universes. The first is more orchestral and sweeping, like a huge expansive world. Then the second is more acoustic, almost cozy and intimate. And in there, there are elements of folk, World music, and R’n’B’, almost a softness of the space. It shrinks down and is more intimate. Volume three is when all that space collapses and it’s almost negative space and that’s when to get to create a mangling of sounds, strange beats, and Hip Hop and Rap and experimental. And Volume four is when all these different forces come together and I guess converge and explode and it’s this box of ‘craziness’. It’s a celebration of the human voice, by that point.”
Wow, I need a moment to stop and take all that in. Collier continues enthusiastically, to explain how he plans, and is already, going about fulfilling this dream. “Ha. Ha. Yes. It sounds overwhelming – and it is – but I’m getting there. I made a list of about 30 singers and performers, producers, and musicians I wanted to work with. I phoned them up, tracked them down. It’s really exciting, collaborating, forging solutions and building bridges across genres, across styles. Mangling things together to create this massive arc of what has become these 50 songs.
How exactly does he go about collaborating – sure he can’t afford endless studio time. “Yeah, Yeah. No Abbey Road isn’t booked out every day (for me). I wish. No. It depends on who you are collaborating with. For example, I flew over to Holland to work with the Metropole Orkest (where they made the title track Djesse). I’ve sources musicians from all over the world. I have, for example, a player from Mali (Oumou Sangaré), Lianne De La Havas, is in there, MARO from Portugal, Chris Thile, Sam Amidon, Steve Vai, Kathryn Tickell, Becca Stevens and it’s a really broad range. And these are heard a Djesse Vol 2. There’s even more to come! One thing I’ve learned is that there’s no one formula to collaboration. It’s having the courage to just be open-minded when you meet and find what’s common and what’s different and combine the two. Sometimes, I’ll travel to America or someone will come to me, here in my room (where it all started).
I ask if there a particular style you like or consider your ‘favourite’. He won two Grammys for his debut, In My Room and was he also recently awarded a PRS for Music Gold Award at the Jazz FM Awards. That’s a real peer acknowledgment. “It’s really unexpected, to be honest. I didn’t even know they gave this award until I looked it up. It’s amazing, it’s crazy to be recognized in this way.”
View this post on Instagram
Collier got to open with one of your heroes, Herbie Hancock during a gig in 2015 (who was out here recently, at the Wellington Jazz Festival). “Wasn’t he amazing?” he says, thinking back about Hancock’s stage shows. “That was one of my first gigs and I was so nervous. That came off the back of my video for Don’t You Worry ‘bout A Thing.” It was Quincy Jones who flew Collier out to the Montreux Jazz Festival where he met with Herbie Hancock.
So if you are performing on the same stage as a big legend like Herbie Hancock, you need an orchestra or band, right? A good one. How does one transfer the digital magic created in the solitude of a bedroom onto a stage of a large 1000+ seat auditorium? “Yeah,” he said, “That was a challenge I put to myself.”
“This amazing guy, Ben Bloomberg (a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab) contacted me. He’d written all this incredible software and wanted to try it out. I guess I was the guinea pig for the development of all his amazing musical hardware, for live performance. Then over some months, he and I this constructed new multimedia live experience. It’s a sort of gazebo of technology. A mix of screens, in real-time, with keyboards and other gadgets so I can make music by myself but through this big multimedia experience.”
Describing it, Collier refers a “circle of musical instruments, with six simultaneous looping stations capable of simultaneous playback, backed by synced real-time 3D-captured video loops, projected onto a screen behind the instruments.” Phew! A real Frankenstein’s monster! “Yup, pretty cool! We first toured this ‘Harmonizer’ for the (2015) European live solo shows, and then the USA. A few weeks later, we opened for Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea at Montreaux.”
I suggest that given his ‘classical experience’ using all this paraphernalia would be distracting or disabling. “Technology,” he can concede “can be distracting, and addictive but empowering if you know how to use it the right way and are confident with it. As a DJ, this is my tool to make music, from samples that I envisage already in the final mix. I can visualize the whole product. It can also be an extraordinarily powerful tool for getting your ideas out fast and collaborating. I grew up in the YouTube generation. This is my stage, my audience. Growing up, I loved the freedom it gave me to listen. I just inverted that process. With the freedom to create at any time, no rules, I had no boundaries.”
And his technology is without boundaries, too. He has “piles” of Google doc of ideas for new instruments and mixers. He talks of an idea of harmonic intelligence, for example. A sort of musical AI. He suggests that if a computer watched a person harmonize for a length of time, then it might be possible to distil that process into software, like a game, that someone without formal musical training could use. He also talks about inventions for the future like crazy video ideas or holograms and generative audio-visuals and new types of musical instruments he wants to build. The future is boundless but for now, New Zealanders will have to be content to see him perform with his ‘Harmonizer” when he brings it here in early September. “I am so happy to be coming there,” he enthuses, “Is there any local music or cultural ideas I should look for?” I suggest he learn the ‘Maori strum and waiata. I describe it to him. “Yeah, that’d be great. Hook me up with someone!” Sure. Any volunteers?
Jacob Collier will play his debut New Zealand shows at Auckland’s The Powerstation on Monday 2 September and Wellington’s Opera House on Wednesday 4 September before returning to Australia for Brisbane and Sydney shows. Tickets are still available from Ticketmaster but get in quick as they’re selling fast!
If you enjoyed this content, please consider donating towards the running of Ambient Light, covering expenses and allowing us to expand the coverage you love by visiting our PressPatron page.