British artist Jacob Collier uploaded a YouTube video 10 years ago that ended up changing his life. It was him doing a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” in six frames, edited together to create a one-man band. He was 18 years old, and the video caught the attention of famed music producer Quincy Jones. Collier has since released four albums, won five Grammys, and collaborated with different rappers, orchestras, and fans. He makes his Hollywood Bowl debut on September 13 with the LA Philharmonic.
Collier tells KCRW he’s written all the arrangements and orchestrations for the show he’s doing with the LA Phil, his six-piece band, and conductor Thomas Wilkins. He describes it as a collage of different worlds: “There's music that goes right back to my very, very beginnings, and there's music that has never been heard before.”
Today, the English musician still lives in the North London home where he filmed his viral YouTube video. As a kid, he says their music room was a refuge for his vivid imagination. That was also where he recorded and produced his 2016 debut album “In My Room.” Two tracks on the record won Grammy awards.
When touring the album, Collier fell in love with including audience members in his performances.
“It was me in the center of a circle of instruments, about 12 musical instruments, and I would gander about between these instruments and loop them or lay them up,” Collier says. “[I worked] with the audience to collaborate, build out ideas, have parts that were sung, parts that were clapped and stamped. And it became a very joyous experience.”
How exactly does it work? While Collier is on stage, he mentally divides his audience into sections and assigns them a musical note. Then, by raising an arm or a finger, he prompts concert-goers to sing those notes or for them to move the note up or down.
“The miraculous thing is that people do have an intuition of what note to go to, especially if you give them a sort of inevitable context within which to navigate,” Collier says. “You've got thousands of people who have never met each other before, probably will never meet again in that exact way, but who are finding themselves within this ever-evolving moving musical creature.”
He adds, “Sometimes it goes miraculously well and sometimes it goes completely wild and crazy, and both results, to me, feel special.”
Since 2018, Collier has also been working on a four-part, 50-song project called “Djesse.” The first three volumes have been released, and he describes that last as “ever closer on the horizon.”
“What I sought to do with this series was something very different from ‘In My Room,’ which was to collaborate on a visceral global scale with all the musicians in the world that I loved and wanted to learn from. It was really an opportunity for me just to learn.”
He adds, “I've been traveling all over the world, imagining this very, very small room of mine in North London as having no borders at all. And throughout that whole experience, I scaled up my idea of what was possible, and how to create detail, and how to paint in high resolution with all of these materials in mind. And the one thing I've never lost sight of is just how important it is to bring the audience into the fold and to collaborate with them too.”
Following in his mother’s footsteps
Collier’s earliest musical memories feature his mother Suzie, who is a violinist and conductor with the Royal Academy of Music. She is slated to join Collier during his Hollywood Bowl debut.
“She'd bring these musicians to life there, breathe life into them. When you're a child, you watch your parents doing whatever they're doing. And you don't question the sense that that makes. For my mother to be physically creating music, it was like, ‘Well, of course, that's what people do, isn't it?’ I think as I grew older, I realized that actually, that was a vast gift for me to receive.”
While Collier doesn’t see himself as a conductor like his mom, he has inadvertently followed in her footsteps.
As he was growing up and learning how to speak, music was like a second language. He would mimic sounds and songs he heard, and by age 2, he started playing the violin.
“By the time I was 4, I'd given up the violin. I think I wanted more immediate results. The violin takes a lot of patience, and I think I wanted to be able to hit something and hear it go bang. Over the first, I suppose, 10 years of my life, I really dipped my toe into every everything I could find that made sound, whether it was a djembe drum or a keyboard instrument, or just a saucepan in the kitchen, if it had a satisfying result that I could incorporate within my kind of paint palette, then it was of great interest to me.”
Collier can play a lot of different instruments, but he sees the human voice as most important.
“There's something about everybody in the world having a voice that is entirely their own — it gives me goosebumps, it's very moving to me. And I think that knowing your own voice, in a musical sense, but also far outside of that, is one of the biggest and most profound things you can seek to do.”