FROM YOUTUBE TO JAZZ FESTS
Jacob Collier wows as one-man band
As far as playing jazz gigs is concerned, you could say that Jacob Collier came to them late. The 22-year-old Londoner’s debut on a bandstand was not even two years ago.
Mind you, that maiden gig was at the 2015 Montreux Jazz Festival, where the gangly, boyish Briton, as impossible as it might sound, performed solo, opening for Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock.
But then, Collier, who landed that splashy musical comingout on the strength of his viral YouTube videos and thanks to Quincy Jones’s support, is a talent of seemingly impossible proportions. His rising-star trajectory also includes two Grammy Award wins this year, for arrangements he created on his 2016 debut album, In My Room.
Collier’s shows feature him not just singing but bounding the breadth of the stage playing grand piano, all manner of keyboards, electric and acoustic bass, guitar, percussion and drum kit. Since Collier is all by himself out there, he uses looping technology to sample and layer his efforts into a 21st-century one-man band’s jawdropping show.
He brings his one-of-a-kind, high-energy performance, which is kind of an approximation of his videos, to the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival’s Tartan Homes Stage for a 10:30 p.m. concert Friday.
The son of two musicians, Collier is largely self-taught on his many instruments. “It’s undeniable that there was music in my blood,” he says. But he adds that he was surrounded by everything from Stevie Wonder to Bach to Stravinsky to Earth Wind and Fire and Bobby McFerrin, in a house where “in every room someone would be playing a musical instrument or there’d be something that would make a sound.”
“I was definitely encouraged — and it’s important to mention, I think — just to invest in my own imagination a lot as a kid. It was a good thing to do what I wanted to do,” Collier says. “I jumped in there with all of my gumption. I jumped into a world of musical learning that was very much led by myself and then I drew from the music that was all around me.”
Collier’s only classical lessons were in singing, from the ages of eight to 13. “I can support my sound from the diaphragm, I can project and I can enunciate and things like that. But I was definitely singing from a lot younger than that. I was sort of brought up to sing from the age of two or three, I was definitely giving it a go.”
He was attracted to his family’s piano because he loved experimenting with chords. “I love the way that they sound and the
way that they fit together and I love the feeling of adding notes in chords and changing them around and just experimenting with the emotional devices that you find in harmony.”
He gradually added other instruments to his arsenal, from drums to guitars to basses and more. “But the way I experimented wasn’t as though I played those instruments with the goal of mastering the technicalities of the instruments. The goal was more than I wanted to get the sound out of the instrument that I heard in my head.”
Before he was a teenager, Collier was using music workstation technology to create the kinds of layered music that featured in his videos. Software, he says, “enabled me to create sounds in stop-time that I was hearing in my head, so things at that age that I wasn’t capable of playing, I was capable of conceiving, and because of that, I was able to lay out the sounds.”
His YouTubing exploits began as a lark, after he saw someone else singing multi-tracked jazz arrangements with a split-screen format. “So I sort of thought in a slightly competitive way, I thought, ‘I’m going to give that go. I’m going to try to do that.’
“As far as the expectations were concerned, I didn’t have any at all. I just found it engaging to make the content. And I thought it would be fun to share it with my friends.”
With each video, Collier’s covers of pop and jazz hits became more fully fledged and even complex. And yet for all the musical minutiae that Collier packs into his work, they remain effervescent, appealing and accessible.
“I’ve spent so much of my life examining the smallest details. In some ways, it’s where I feel most at home,” Collier says. “For me, it’s super important to understand all of the different nuances of light and shade. But if you can’t paint in primary colours, no one’s going to listen to your songs, because they need to feel like something.”
Then the videos became increasingly popular, until his video of Don’t You Worry About A Thing, the Stevie Wonder song, notched “100,000 views overnight or something ... that was crazy.
“And then suddenly I got an email from Herbie Hancock and Take Six, and then Quincy Jones called me up and everything changed,” Collier says.
“I began to think of this as not just something I was doing fun, but actually a fun way to be spending my time in terms of having a career, which is something that had never crossed my mind, really.”
He recorded In My Room, which was indeed made in the same room where he’d created the videos. “That album changed pace of things,” Collier says, noting that he made four videos for the album’s four singles. And while his earlier videos took less than a week to complete, more recent efforts could take a month or longer because they were much more complicated.
Since the release of his album, Collier transformed from a YouTube phenom into a performer touring the world — and loving it.
“I’ve managed to get this wonderful kind of energetic thing going when I perform, which is really special,” he says. “I love experiencing the feeling of sharing the music with the room.”
Collier, who has played with the fusion group Snarky Puppy, says he sees himself collaborating with other musicians and leading a band down the road.
“But right now this one-man show is leading the way for planting the seeds for touring. I’m learning such a lot about how to maintain my energy and all that kind of stuff. But it’s been a wonderful process. It’s just been an insane three years, really.”
The way I experimented wasn’t as though I played those instruments with the goal of mastering the technicalities of the instruments.