![]() Then there are those for whom technical prowess seems almost like an impediment to creating music that speaks to large audiences.Ĭollier is a peculiar case: a wunderkind whose objectively groundbreaking music can strike listeners as unremarkable, even dull. Some are audibly blessed with more of one gift than another. On New Year’s Day, he posted an Instagram video of himself playing a raucous keyboard solo designed so that the notes, as they appeared in his recording software, spelled out “HAPPY 2021.”īut do great gifts necessarily yield good songs? There has always been a tension in music, especially in pop, between technical fluency and the more nebulous qualities - style, wit, magnetism, emotional pull - that make a performer captivating. When Jason King, the chairman of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, asked the jazz piano great Herbie Hancock for a point of comparison to Collier, in terms of talent, Hancock replied, “Maybe Stravinsky?” Musicians and musicologists have been floored by Collier’s harmonic explorations, like the brain-bending modulation from the key of E to that of “G½ sharp” in his 2016 rendition of “In the Bleak Midwinter.” He revels in whimsical, high-degree-of-difficulty challenges. To call Collier a genius is not exactly a critical judgment. The performance was typical Collier: a kind of epic humblebrag, a casual display of genius. He sang and played every note when he performed the song on “The Late Late Show With James Corden” in January, he raced between instruments, tapping at a vibraphone, playing kick drum and piano simultaneously and fingering the Harmonizer, an instrument designed for him by an M.I.T. chorus, the sturdiest groove Collier has concocted. There is a psychedelic prechorus and a buoyant R.&B. There is pop-soul crooning and weird vocal harmonies that swoop across the stereo spectrum. There are electronic bleats and snatches of funk guitar. But like all his songs, it is also about music itself, a formal exercise that tests how many sounds and ideas one pop recording can bear. It is, seemingly, a song about a breakup: “Now the time has come for me to admit/I don’t think I could be your line of best fit,” Collier sings, a lyric that doesn’t quite trip off the tongue. The most striking attempt is “Sleeping on My Dreams,” which Collier has called his favorite track on the album. 3” - Collier’s most pop-facing record, in which he strives to marry the heady stuff of those master classes with the kind of R.&B. Four albums have followed, including the current Grammy nominee, “Djesse Vol. The video caught the attention of Quincy Jones, who signed the teenager to a management deal. ![]() (He studied in prestigious conservatories and was raised in a musical household.) But what really stood out was the song’s harmonic intricacy: a multi-tracked chorale of Colliers, swerving through jazzy extensions and gnarly near-dissonances that resolved in surprising ways. One was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” featuring Collier on keyboards, guitar, bouzouki, double bass and percussion. Collier is a star who has toured the world and won four Grammys - he is nominated for three more in 2021, including Album of the Year - yet he is most in his element when he faces a lecture-hall audience or a laptop camera and plumbs the deeps of music theory, holding forth on plagal cadences, time signatures in Bulgarian folk music and his own esoteric innovations, such as the continually modulating musical scale he has named the Super-Ultra-Hyper-Mega-Meta-Lydian.Ĭollier is 26, but with his baby face and string-bean limbs, he looks little different than he did nearly a decade ago, when videos showcasing his virtuosity first circulated online. There are clips of him explicating the harmonic structure of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke.” There are the Logic Breakdown Sessions, in which he examines his own music at the molecular level, walking step by step through the construction of his songs. ![]() There are videos of him conducting master classes at the Berklee College of Music and the University of Southern California. ![]() On the internet, you can find dozens of examples of Collier in professorial mode, or as professorial as it gets for a guy whose wardrobe leans to rainbow-colored Crocs and hats with ears. To begin wrapping your mind around Jacob Collier, the wizardly English singer-songwriter-arranger-producer, the place to start is not a recording or a music video or a concert. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |