From Youtube to the Royal Albert Hall
Self-taught Jacob Collier wowed the internet with his multiinstrumental skills. He talks to Ivan Hewett about his Proms debut
‘Ihave never in my life seen a talent like this,” says pop supremo Quincy Jones. “Talent oozing from every pore,” says singer and pianist Jamie Cullum. “Great chords, great arranging, great singing,” says jazz guitar star Pat Metheny. From small beginnings on Youtube, where Jacob Collier posted videos of himself singing and playing all the instruments on his own arrangements of songs by Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and others, Collier is now a proper star, who also performs and composes his own material. The 23-year-old Londoner has just completed a year-long solo world tour, and is about to make his Proms debut.
“I’ve just invited a bunch of music-loving friends along,” he says, “including my friend Hamid El Kasri. He’s a wonderful performer of Moroccan folk music called gnawa.” How did Collier discover him? “Exploring on the internet. That’s the wonder of the 21st century,” he says, with a gesture of amazement. Collier is always gesturing – his arms and hands are in constant motion, and his hair gets wilder during our conversation as he runs his fingers through it searching for the right word. A glance at Collier’s early Youtube videos is enough to convince anyone of his talent. At 16, he recorded himself singing Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely in six-part harmony, stitching each one together so that six Jacob Colliers – in different shirts with different hairstyles – appeared on the screen at the same time. A year later, he made an even more sophisticated video, which also showed him playing string bass, several keyboards and numerous exotic percussion instruments in a version of Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing, seemingly all at the same time.
“That was the first one that went totally viral. It got something like 100,000 hits overnight”, he says.
It was that viral Youtube video that led to a fateful encounter. “Quincy Jones sent me an email, saying, ‘Yo, let’s hang out on Skype, I think what you’re doing is really interesting’,” says Collier. Eventually they met, and Jones took the youngster under his wing, managing his career and inviting him to the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2014 as the support act for Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.
“Quincy is just this tremendous bundle of human energy,” says Collier. “He has reached the point where he doesn’t need to prove anything, so he just endorses what he loves.”
Landing the Montreux Festival gig coincided with another fruitful meeting, this time with Ben Bloomberg, a PHD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “He’d seen my videos, and got in touch to suggest I come to MIT so we could create a machine together that would allow me to do my multi-tracking stuff in real time,” says Collier. The race was then on to complete the machine in time for the Montreux gig. Collier confesses the only time he’s been nervous on stage was just before the debut of the new machine.
“We had created this crazy harmoniser, which allows me to sing a note, or any number of notes, while I’m playing the keyboard, so what you hear is my voice singing all of the notes my hands are playing. It’s like an on-the-spot instant choir. It’s very cutting-edge, and Ben and I were debugging the machine hours before I went on stage.”
Shortly after that gig, Collier recorded his debut album In My Room for the Membran label. “I’ve always wanted to keep my own personal creative space, and do everything myself,” says Collier. The album was released in 2016, and immediately entered the itunes jazz charts at number one in 21 countries. In 2017, two tracks from it won Grammy awards, including an arrangement of The Flintstones theme tune.
It’s an astonishing story and one that sounds even more extraordinary when you discover that Collier has achieved all this with little formal training, apart from singing lessons and some jazz classes at the Royal Academy of Music. The son of two classical violinists, Collier started experimenting with vocal harmony on a computer at the age of seven before going on to teach himself keyboards and string instruments. “I just became accustomed to being all the members of the band,” he says. “That was something that was really exciting to me.”
Collier is now busy on his next project, a collaborative venture involving Holland’s Metropole Orkest, for which the Proms is a tantalising preview. I ask whether there’s any space in his life for relationships, and for a split-second the unstoppable flow of words pauses. “Not currently. It’s very tricky with touring. For now, it’s just a matter of living in the moment, doing my stuff, and if that’s with another person that’s fine, and if not that’s also fine. I feel I’ve got so much to learn and explore. If I make too many firm plans I will close some doors, and I’m at the age now where I can just take everything as it comes.”