the times | Monday August 10 2020 1GT 9

arts

he says. “I loved the bendy,

wonky notes that you hear

on the streets of Morocco,

in Brazilian samba, even in

Viennese waltz, which is

called microtonal harmony.

I was making connections

between all this, and with a

brain that has always been

fast with numbers I began

to visualise the ratios of

music. A lot of the

grooviest music is the

wonkiest. The same could

be said of life.”

Can he just enjoy a piece of music,

or does he always break down the

science of it? “It’s a bit like a flower,”

he says. “You can just look at it. Or

you can think about why it is growing

where it is, what gave it momentum

and so on. I can listen to, say, Joni

Mitchell’s Coyote and know that she

thinks quarterly — as in, chords built

in fourths — but I can also enjoy the

way she has a huge array of styles

that are led by a united aesthetic.

Ultimately, listening to Joni Mitchell is

more important to me than data-based

learning.”

Jones has been a key influence. “He

tells me that jazz is the classical music

of pop,” he says of the 87-year-old

producer and songwriter who has

become his manager and mentor.

“In jazz people were exploring and

offered classical piano lessons and

I remember thinking, ‘Not for me,

thanks,’ ” he says of his early

education. “But I did learn how to

sing and I did a bunch of operas,

which was super-fun because I got to

dive into Benjamin Britten’s harmonic

language.”

Most eight-year-old

boys’ idea of super-fun

involves Nerf gun

battles in the park.

“I also got to miss a

bunch of school,” he

points out. “While

I was learning

harmony I was

listening to Beck, Björk

and Earth, Wind and

Fire, and I couldn’t see why

you couldn’t make a compound

of all these musical flavours. I’ve been

doing it ever since.”

Collier discovered jazz at 16 and

realised the possibilities of improvising

within the harmonic language he was

getting to grips with. “I was joining the

dots,” he says. “I knew the sound of

a tritone substitution, for example, but

didn’t know it had a name.”

It is here I feel compelled to point

out to Collier that, being a mere rock

and pop critic, I have no idea what he’s

on about. “That’s the thing: I had to

take the education and put it to one

side in order to actually create stuff,”

stretching concepts within the basis of

songs. That is what I’m trying to do.”

This is at the heart of his mammoth

Djesse Vol 1, made with the Metropole

Orchestra, which was about creating

a big acoustic sound. For Vo l 2 he

explored the small acoustic sound of

folk and world music. For Vo l 3 he is

using negative space, or the silence

around the notes, which can be found

in a lot of rap and R&B. And he has

become famous along the way.

“Generally, I’m too fascinated in the

process of music to notice that I’ve

actually been having a career,” he says

of the past few years, “but it was when

I stretched the harmonies of Don’t You

Worry ’Bout a Thing that everything

really changed. After posting a video

of myself doing it in 2013 I woke up

the next day to find 100,000 views,

and emails from Herbie Hancock and

Quincy Jones. Now I’m lucky enough

to be in a position that allows me to

collaborate with people — even

during quarantine, thanks to the

technological era we are in.”

All of this has made Collier nothing

if not open-minded, and he can hear

innovations in pop and hip-hop that

musicians who are confined to a single

genre or tradition might miss. “I’ve

collaborated with a rapper called Ty

Dolla Sign and he is a really deep cat,”

he says. “He’ll go deep into harmonics,

but if I tell him to listen to part of a

chamber opera by Benjamin Britten

he’ll say, ‘Bro, what the hell are you

talking about?’ We’re in a joyous time

in music right now because there

really aren’t many boundaries.”

You could argue that by multiplying

himself on YouTube videos or through

looping in live concerts, Collier is

doing other musicians out of a job.

“As a kid I was always trying

to get friends to sing or play

along with me, but the most

meaningful music happened

alone,” he says. “I had this

amazing space [his room] where

it felt like I was painting a canvas

with the perspectives I was

learning from, so I borrowed my

sister’s iPad and made videos of

various Jacobs playing the

instruments. But after having

toured the world for two or three

years as a one-man show, I did

a tour last year with a four-piece

and, to be honest, it was a

massive relief. When I’m on stage

by myself I’m so busy being a

performer, and dealing with the

technology, that I can’t actually be a

musician. With other musicians there,

I could improvise.”

Given Collier’s myriad achievements,

you might wonder if he is offering real

expression or just an endless parade of

musical and technological tricks. “My

excitement is in making things, and as

a result people don’t expect me to

deliver one thing; it is more a case of

trusting me to do something

interesting,” he says of his approach.

“As long as we can keep our brains

out of the code-based, grid-based,

computer-quantising hell, we are in an

exciting creative revolution right now.”

What does he do for fun? “Well, I

live with my mother and my two

sisters and we play games together in

the evening,” he says, before adding:

“We also sing Bach chorales.”

‘We’re in a joyous time in music’

Jacob Collier plays

lots of instruments

at once by simply

multiplying

himself, he tells

Will Hodgkinson

J

acob Collier is in his

childhood bedroom in

Finchley, north London, and

it must have more than 100

musical instruments in it.

Behind him is a series of

hand drums. There are ten

acoustic guitars of various

shapes hanging from a wall. There is a

keyboard with Collier’s four Grammy

trophies on it. There is only one Jacob

Collier in the room, though, and that

isn’t always the case. In the series of

homemade YouTube videos that got

this 25-year-old polymath discovered

by Quincy Jones and lauded by Herbie

Hancock, Chris Martin of Coldplay

and countless others, there are

generally at least four of him.

“In this room,” Collier says of the

place where he made his suitably titled

2016 debut In My Room, and from

where he is speaking via Zoom, “you

are surrounded by a ton of things that

make noises. Some are instruments.

Some are weird objects.” He points to

a stringed wooden box that looks like

a loom. “Here we have a harpejji,

which is somewhere between an

accordion and a pedal steel guitar.

I grew up in this room; it’s where I

learnt to walk, it is the heart of my

creative life. It’s a nice place to spend

quarantine in.”

Collier is not your average YouTube

personality. The son of the violinist,

conductor and Royal Academy of

Music professor Susan Collier, he

was singing in operas throughout

childhood and had his own Prom at

the tender age of 23, yet his greatest

musical loves are Stevie Wonder and

Joni Mitchell. He studied at the

Purcell School and the

Royal Academy, and in

a joint project with

the Massachusetts

Institute of

Technology built an

instrument called a

vocal harmoniser that

allows him to sing

multiple notes at one

time. Yet he says he hates

theory and learnt more

from listening to albums on the

bus than he did from his studies.

As he speaks with cheerful, dizzying

rapidity about negative acoustic space,

microtonal harmony and other things

I don’t quite understand, he comes

across as a fresh-faced and earnest

Young Musician of the Year type. Yet

he has been embraced by American

rappers and R&B stars, many of whom

appear on Djesse Vol 3, the latest part

of his 50-song album series. He is

exploding with too many ideas to be

contained by one person. No wonder

he had to multiply himself.

“When I was seven or eight I was

ROBBY KLEIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE RECORDING ACADEMY; BETSY NEWMAN

Djesse Vol 3 by Jacob

Collier (Decca) is out

on August 14

language.”

Most

boys’

inv

ba

“I

b

p

I

ha

liste

and E

Fire, an

you couldn

ofallthese musica

ed at the

tes

e

ms on the

is studies

t

a

m

a

a

it

w

le

s

v

in

t y a a m b p

Jacob Collier is being techn

managed and mentored

by Quincy Jones, left