Tech lets prodigy share music of his mind
Jacob Collier hit the stage dancing in his stocking feet at his SFJazz debut Wednesday, June 7, and never stopped.
The only time the 22-yearold double Grammy winner was relatively still was when he was seated at the piano, breaking hearts playing and singing “In the Real Early Morning,” which began life as a poem about remembered love.
It was only Collier’s second San Francisco show, after a debut last fall at the Great American Music Hall, but it was the start of a two-month tour that will take him to the Hollywood Bowl this weekend and on to dates across the U.S. and Canada, then to Europe, back to the States, and then back to the United Kingdom.
It’s a packed itinerary, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary for Collier. He’s been on the road pretty much nonstop even
before his debut album “In My Room” was released last summer.
Collier grew up (and still lives) in a musical household in London, the oldest of three children. His mother, Susan, is a well-regarded violinist, conductor and teacher, and her son remembers playing a miniature violin at the age of 2. But that part of his career was short-lived, he says at an interview at the Kabuki Hotel before his show.
“I can remember giving up the violin at age 4. I made a conscious decision because I wanted faster gratification. I wanted something you could hit and make a sound.”
At the word “hit,” he slams his hands together in the air and half-rises from the couch in the hotel lobby.
Some people talk with their hands. Collier talks with his entire body. Even seated, he is moving. His arms pinwheel or stretch upward as he explains a point, his hands in a continuous pas de deux.
It should be noted that Collier has arrived for the interview wearing a saffron-color T-shirt with the image of a synthesizer on the front, gray sweatpants and stocking feet. All the better to half-slide across the lobby floor to a seating area at the side.
Although largely a selftaught musician, Collier did attend what he calls “normal school” until he was 16, “which was great, because I was surrounded by all kinds of people who were great at lots of kinds of things.”
But he was spending much of his time in one room in the family’s North London home, the room with the piano in it. Over time, it became his bedroom, but more important, it became his studio, and still is. He saved up enough money to buy his first guitar and brought it to the room. Then he saved for a bass guitar, and brought that to the room. He received a double bass for his 14th birthday, a drum kit was added, and then more instruments — a lot more, including instruments he finds as he travels the world performing. The overstuffed room is pictured on the CD cover of “In My Room.”
Collier’s sense of music is, in fact, a heightened sense of sounds, all kinds of sounds.
“To this day, I just sort of enjoy recording with ambient sounds — more than real instruments, actually, because they sound like my life and I enjoy that.”
Sound awareness at that level — “the brain that always hears music,” as he puts it — is never a burden, but Collier admits it’s occasionally good to turn it off.
At 16, he enrolled in the Purcell School, for young music students, in London. At the same time, he began to attend the weekend jazz program at the Royal Academy of Music, and the experience was transformative. Although he’d listened to jazz before, this was the first time he was “able to play jazz with other musicians my age, and that was amazing, because I’d never seen musicians my age who could think in harmonies.”
The program also exposed him to critical thinking and writing about music.
“I knew the sound of playing a D-major five over the note C, but I didn’t know people called that Lydian until I went to the jazz program and I learned that people had a vocabulary with which to work. It was thrilling to me.”
A lot of knowledge became not a dangerous thing, but somewhat of a disruptive thing for Collier as he began to study at the Royal Academy for a degree as a jazz pianist.
“I saw possibilities that weren’t in the textbook,” he says. “I found myself rejecting the norms, what was talked about in how to use different chords and things like that.
“It’s always important to learn the rulebooks so you know where you’re coming from,” he adds, “But I’ve always been somebody who enjoys taking ideas and sort of turning them on their heads. I’ve always had a philosophy of learning that you take what’s useful and you use it in a way that’s useful to you.”
Technology has been especially useful to Collier, who began posting his own multilayered arrangements of songs by Stevie Wonder and others six years ago. Then, as now, the vocal arrangements suggest multiple voices — his style has echoes of Bobby McFerrin, Manhattan Transfer and midcentury vocal ensembles like the Modernaires. But the voices in a Collier song are all his, meticulously matched as if a roomful of Jacobs were singing at once.
Music industry veterans took notice, including Quincy Jones, who signed him to his management company and remains his patron to this day.
“In My Room” includes music by Stevie Wonder, and the theme from “The Flintstones,” but most of the tracks are Collier’s own compositions. The title song is, of course, by Brian Wilson, but it also reflects the album’s genesis in Collier’s room, which is more than just a home music lab.
“My only goal was to try to crystallize that room,” he says, “the feeling of being in that room as Jacob at age 21.”
Making music in a room is one thing, but taking that “room” on tour would have been impossible were it not for an MIT grad student named Ben Bloomberg who contacted Collier through Facebook and said he enjoyed making things. Did Collier have anything in mind? What evolved was a singular miracle of technology, a one-of-a-kind electronic synthesizer that enables Collier to perform live while multiplying and layering his own voice, enhancing it with modulations of the sound of the instruments he’s playing on stage — piano, guitar, bass guitar, bass, drums, cowbells and other percussive instruments.
As he performs, onstage video cameras capture his image and adapt it into an instant animated music video that plays on a large screen behind the stage. The video is grounded not only in what Collier is doing as he whirls around the stage in his ballooning harem pants and oversize white T-shirt, but also in how he is singing — the pitch of his voice, how loud or soft he may be.
Technology is especially empowering for Collier and many other young musicians — it’s what they’ve grown up on. He got his foot in the door on the Internet and immediately embraced technology as integral to his art.
“What tech does really well is distract people,” he says, but “the best use of anybody’s technical skills ... is to serve some sort of emotional thing.” In fact, as he creates, he’s constantly on guard to ensure that the emotional content of his music is dominant.
“Thinking theoretically about things has its dangers, because the more you engage the part of your brain that organizes and puts into plain words and has structures, the less things are able to flow. It’s always important for me to have a really emotional relationship to music and tech.”
Tech and the Internet did not create Jacob Collier — they were always and remain the tools of his artistic trade.
“That’s my story,” he says. “I just started making stuff, and I’ve tried to maintain that — a kid in his room making things.”