Aug 27, 2024 12:09 PM
Remembering Russell Malone, 1963-2024
Guitarist and bandleader Russell Malone died Aug. 23, while on tour in Japan, after battling end-stage kidney failure.…
“If I rewind to 10 years ago, I was an explorer,” says Collier. “Now I’m an artist and an explorer.”
(Photo: Michael Jackson)Jacob Collier started to build his fanbase back in 2011 when he began sharing intoxicating arrangements to popular songs on YouTube. One of those fans was Quincy Jones, who in 2015 flew to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London to watch Collier’s solo show. Jones began managing him soon afterward. The rest, as they say, is history … but not quite. Just turning 30 — with five studio albums and four world tours under his technicolored belt — the multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger and educator is just getting started.
Collier has been described by fans and the press as a genius and a musical prodigy, and such praise is backed up by the likes of Jones and Herbie Hancock — his chosen “godfathers” — as well as film score composer-producer Hans Zimmer and Chris Martin of Coldplay. Such descriptors don’t appear to faze the young English musician, whose first four albums yielded a total of six Grammy Awards.
Music is in Collier’s blood. His mother, Suzie Collier, is a violinist, conductor and professor at the Royal Academy of Music; she had followed in almost the exact same footsteps as her father, Derek Collier. If you see Jacob perform with an orchestra, as he often does, you’ll likely spot his mom.
Collier could be called the first crossover jazz-infused star of the digital age. His YouTube versions of popular tracks like Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing” and Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” demonstrated a rare level of talent, and not just in reference to his age. In his split-screen videos, Collier plays a band’s worth of instruments, from drums to upright bass to keyboards, and performs harmony vocals divided into eight parts. His bedroom-based feats of ingenuity led directly to his first studio album, In My Room (Membrane International/Must Have Jazz/Qwest), released in 2016.
The Djesse period came next. Collier released a series of four albums between 2018 and 2024, each of them with distinct characters and showcasing remarkable virtuosity in harmony and composition. They boasted impressive lineups — not only featuring some of the biggest names in jazz, but chart-topping pop stars, too, from Alicia Keys to British rapper Stormzy. In total, Collier has worked with more than 150 collaborators.
The most notable collaborator of all, perhaps, is his audience. In 2019, Collier began to experiment with turning his audiences into split-harmony choirs. In fact, it’s this creative move that inspired the direction of Djesse Vol. 4, but Collier’s infatuation with the voice began much earlier. “If I look back at my earliest musical fascinations when I was aged 16 or 17 — recording in that room in London — they were all about the human voice,” he says.
Collier is not guilty of gatekeeping. He frequently teaches master classes in music theory; at age 23, he took part in a 15-minute video on harmony for WIRED, explaining the concept to viewers through five levels of difficulty from “child” level through “Herbie Hancock” level, and, yes, Hancock shows up in the video. It went viral, with 15 million people watching Collier exchange wisdom with the legend.
Days before his 30th birthday on Aug. 2, Collier took a pause during one of the last dates of his U.S. tour to talk with DownBeat from a diner in Cincinnati. He was delivered a hamburger and fries as the conversation began.
Moments later, a mega-fan approaches the table. “I’m very sorry,” Collier says. “I can’t take a picture right now. I’m in an interview.” All the while, he politely refuses to bite into his burger as we talk, despite encouragement. He speaks with vibrant enthusiasm, as if this were the first and last interview he’d ever done. He is the most animated, excited-to-be-alive musician you could ever hope to meet.
Tina Edwards: I would love to ask you to reflect on your four Djesse albums, now that the final album, Vol. 4, has been released. Do you find that each one has a different character?
Jacob Collier: I do. When I laid out the four-album plan at the end of 2017, I knew that I wanted them to each be distinct, sonically. I knew that Vol. 1 was going to be orchestral and vast, Vol. 2 would be acoustic and intimate, Vol. 3 would be more experimental and digital sounding, then Vol. 4 was just a question mark — I didn’t know! When I listen back to them now, they definitely hold an identity sonically, but I can also sense the person I was in each chapter; how I was amassing this experience, my priorities, my skill set — there’s a sort of North Star that shone through the whole thing that led me to make certain decisions.
Edwards: How did you solve the question mark behind Vol. 4?
Collier: The interesting thing was that I really didn’t know what it was going to look like; I didn’t have a sense of it. I wasn’t traveling [due to COVID restrictions], and like many other artists around the world, I was just a bit thrown by the lack of people and the lack of reality that was surrounding the work I was doing. It took until I went on tour in 2022 to really figure out what the identity of that one was.
Ultimately, it was the audience choir that kicked it into being. It was standing on a stage and pushing the envelope within myself of what audiences can do when they’re singing or when they’re directed in interesting ways that completely rocked my socks off. That ended up being the anchor point of the album. Not just musically, but kind of spiritually.
Edwards: You’ve often used the voice very creatively, starting with your own vocal arrangements on YouTube. But what was the first moment where you thought about turning a live audience into a choir?
Collier: It dates back to my first memories of being a human. When I was 2, I used to watch my mom conduct the chamber orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music — she still does it to this day. It was an amazing thing to watch her conduct and for the musicians to just spring into life. It’s like casting a spell; I can’t unsee that. I never thought of myself as a conductor of any kind. Then, when I started going on tour with a one-man show, I think I got excited about the audience getting involved. It wasn’t until the end of 2019 that I first did the thing where I divide them into three parts and then move the parts up and down in pitch.
They would move by themselves, and it was a truly profound moment of realization for me because there was the feeling that it’s so much bigger than me; I’m tapping into an understanding that everybody in the world has. As long as they’ve ever heard music, there’s a sense that they understand what to do. I feel both at my biggest, but also in a sense at my smallest, in a beautiful way. I feel like a pixel in the image, but I don’t feel like a main character in it. I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface, and I’ve been exploring it for five years.
Edwards: Does it take courage to explore ideas like these? If so, what does courage look like to you?
Collier: Connecting with people always takes courage of some kind, right? It begins with the courage to look within yourself and figure out who you are, where you are, what matters to you, what interests you — and build a language out of those things. Then it becomes the courage to share that stuff. I think every artist on the face of the earth … experiences that feeling. It’s a strange culture for creating things, because I feel like in some ways there’s quite a pressure to be ready immediately. Pressure to come out of the gates knowing all the answers, knowing who you are, knowing what you want to say. I’ve embraced, over the years, the courage to take time.
Edwards: Your music theory knowledge feels infinite. I’m wondering how that affects your music making? Does the knowledge overwhelm you, or liberate you?
Collier: That’s a big question. I think of my love for music as having increased in resolution over time. What I mean by that is, I feel in an exciting way that if I hear something, or I play something, I’m able to understand both on an emotional level and then also on a technical level, the components that make it useful or meaningful or funny or interesting. Then there’s also the part of music that no one really understands and can never understand, which is the magic and the mystery of it.
I’ve definitely spent a lot of time over the years deepening my understanding of things I love and reverse-engineering stuff. If I hear something I like, I’ll think, “Why do I like that? What is this? How does this work? Where does this want to move? What are the emotional properties of this?” The thing I’ve come to realize — especially as an artist — is that if I rewind to 10 years ago, I was an explorer. Now I’m an artist and an explorer. You can’t expect people to be moved by ideas or information. The only thing that can move a person is a person, right? So the best thing you can do as an artist is to embrace the idea of building a language out of the things that make you you. The stuff that feels the most you out of everything, you acquire that, and you stretch it and you understand it.
I would say, in a sense, when I’m writing music or playing music now, I’m not sitting there counting up numbers and solving equations and things with theory. In fact, I don’t think about theory at all — it’s kind of disappeared for me in a sense.
Edwards: Let’s revert back to 10 years ago for a moment; you were building a name for yourself as the U.K. jazz scene was picking up steam. Did you feel a part of it?
Collier: To go back a couple steps further than that, I grew up deeply interested and fascinated by a lot of different kinds of music, including jazz. I remember there was a JazzFM compilation CD that ruled my car for the first 10 years of my life; I know every note of every song. But in the same car, there was Bartók, Bobby McFerrin, Queen, Sting and Stevie Wonder.
So, I think the first time I ever really encountered jazz as a defined concept was when I was about 16. I was starting to get really interested in harmony. I’ve always been absolutely obsessed with chords and what happens when you collide them in unusual, interesting ways. So that led me to start to explore the jazz scene as a student.
Edwards: Tell us about studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Collier: I studied there, aged 16, in the junior jazz department, and I auditioned for that on both bass and piano. I wasn’t sure which to play, but I was encouraged to do piano as that’s where the chords are. I never really went into the jazz education system thinking that on the other side, I would be a jazz musician. I guess the time I felt the closest to the jazz scene was when I was studying it. When I left the Academy, halfway through my degree, I had this fierce hunger for expanding on the language of the things I was learning within the jazz world, but taking a step far beyond. I didn’t think too much about genre and what kind of genre I wanted to live in, and I still don’t really think about that. Maybe I think about that now less than ever before.
Edwards: Your music and your mind have been championed by some of the greatest living legends, from Quincy Jones, who signed you in 2014, to Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Is there anything they’ve shared with you that has influenced your music-making process?
Collier: Quincy and Herbie are like my two godfathers! It’s been the most extraordinary privilege to get to know them. Some of the knowledge, wisdom and advice I’ve got from them is unsaid; it comes from hanging out and through osmosis. Quincy often talks about the balance between science and soul. It’s the idea of understanding the criteria, the materials at play, the tool kit you have; his science has defined the game, but it’s his soul that has moved people.
I forget when I’m hanging out with Herbie that he’s not 18. He’s one of these people that is so excited by life. Because of his deep Buddhist studies over the past 50-plus years, I think he’s very connected to the world. He’s the kind of spiritual being who is limitless; not opaque or intimidating. He wants to bring you into it. He also plays how he feels. Those two have really changed my life.
Me and Wayne Shorter have gone back so many years, and I remember Wayne Shorter once saying to me, “Play what you wish for.” It’s just one of those extreme bits of advice that hits you.
Edwards: You have a unique outlook; how do you see the world?
Collier: I see people as needing people more than they’ve ever needed people before. The world right now is more open, more vulnerable, more colorful than it’s ever been. It’s an interesting time to be creating music and creating things in the world. I think it’s a challenging time to be creating things and to be a human in this world as well.
Foundationally, what I have noticed just from experiences, is that you get to design the world you live in based on how you see it. This is one of the things I’ve spoken to Herbie about — and it’s a nuanced thing to articulate — but Herbie does such a good job of it.
If you look for fear in the world, you find it everywhere. If you look for doubt, if you look for cracks, then you find them.
It’s true that a lot of things in the world right now are scary and unknown, and there aren’t clear answers to a lot of the world’s biggest problems. The other side of it is also true: If you look for love in the world, you will find it everywhere, in everything. Sometimes it’s so deeply in disguise, but really everyone’s just trying to love in the best way they know how. DB
In addition to his instrumental prowess, Malone was praised for his musical generosity and his singular sense of humor.
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