Understandably, Jacob Collier suspected one of his mates was pulling a prank.
In 2013, when Collier was just 19, he uploaded a video to YouTube: a cover of Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing, which he recorded at his family’s home in London. Within a couple of days, it notched up more than 100,000 views, so he made it available for purchase online.
Soon after, Collier – who will embark on his first arena tour of Australia in December – received an email informing him that Herbie Hancock had bought five of his recordings. Then came a message purporting to be from the jazz legend himself: “Wow, Jacob! Your stuff is amazing. Please keep expanding in your life, as well as your music. I believe that craft may be about melody, rhythm, harmony, the notes etc but music is about life. -Herbie Hancock.”
Collier plays dozens of instruments including the piano, guitar and drums.Credit: Wayne Taylor
“My first instinct was, ‘Which one of my homies is trying to pull the wool over my eyes?’” says Collier, gazing at the Melbourne skyline from a top-floor suite, complete with a grand piano, in the Park Hyatt hotel. “I just thought, ‘This is insane!’ But it really was Herbie.”
This was followed by another pinch-me moment when his video came to the attention of Quincy Jones, one of the world’s most acclaimed music producers.
“Quincy just lost his mind,” recalled Adam Fell, the president of Jones’ production company. “He said, ‘I don’t care what you’re doing right now, I don’t care how busy you are – find this kid’.”
Jones was so taken with Collier’s version of Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing that he would play it, alongside Wonder’s original recording, to whomever he was meeting. “It didn’t matter if it was Paul McCartney or Queen Rania,” Fell told the BBC. “Quincy would show them that video and say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this! Have you?’”
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Famously, when Jones tried to sign Collier, the young singer and his mother suggested they and Jones first get to know each other as friends.
“As a child, I created so much music in the solitary cocoon of my family’s music room,” explains Collier, who is dressed in a typically flamboyant ensemble of yellow Crocs, red pants and multicoloured parachute jacket. “I didn’t have a team at the time; it was just me and my mum, and I wasn’t sure what it would feel like to work with other people. The fact that Quincy and I built our working relationship on a foundation of friendship and human connection was so valuable.”
When we meet, Collier, 30, is fresh from performing as a headline act in the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. He looks as though he’s in his early 20s, yet he has the vocabulary and impeccable manners of a middle-aged English gentleman.
Over the past dozen years, his work has racked up hundreds of millions of streams across TikTok, YouTube and Spotify. He’s collaborated with everyone from Joni Mitchell and Coldplay to Alicia Keys, David Crosby and the rapper Stormzy. And he has already won seven Grammy Awards, making him the only British artist to claim at least one Grammy for each of his first five studio albums. It’s little wonder he’s been labelled a “genius”, a “jazz messiah” and the “Mozart of Gen Z” by critics.
‘Whatever he does blows my mind.’
Quincy Jones on Jacob Collier
“He’s so in demand,” said Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who is now a friend of the Collier family. “We all recognised, ‘Oh, this guy can make us sound better’.” Jones, who died last year, declared that “whatever he does blows my mind”. Film composer Hans Zimmer raved that much of Collier’s work “is on the edge of the impossible”, while Hancock went as far as to rank Collier’s harmonic talents above his own. “I thought I was good with harmonies,” he said, “but he was all over my stuff – and past that.”
But what is it that makes Collier’s music so special?
As Jones once explained, Western music has used the same 12 notes of the chromatic scale for several hundred years. But Collier likes to operate in the spaces in between, with an array of “micro-notes” and “quarter tones” that, incredibly, he can distinguish by ear. He also plays dozens of instruments.
His cover of Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing, made entirely by himself, is a good example. On that track alone, he plays the guitar, mandolin, double bass, keyboard, piano, djembe drums, box drums, cowbell, egg shakers and a tambourine; he also recorded several different vocal elements – some of which sound peculiar in isolation – before stitching them together to form a beautifully layered whole. (His videos frequently use a split screen format to showcase each aspect.)
Collier in the music room of his family’s home in London.
“I’d stay up until the early hours of the morning after spending a whole day at school,” Collier says. “I was doing things harmonically and rhythmically that I’d never heard before. It was such an exciting time; I felt like I was building my own little cathedral out of matchsticks.”
When Collier was a toddler, his mother, Suzie – an acclaimed violinist, conductor and professor – noticed how he’d tune in to the hum of the vacuum cleaner. Heeding the advice of her late father, Derek (a violinist himself, and a former leader of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra), she sang to her son from birth and encouraged him to explore the sounds around him.
“A car alarm would go off and she’d say, ‘Oh, look at this! That’s an E major chord’,” he says. “When you’re a child, your imagination is as important as the real world, if not more so, and she was able to show me this world of sound that really lit me up.”
When Collier brings his Djesse World Tour to Australia in December (“Djesse” being a play on his initials, JC), he’ll be supported by local musician Nai Palm. As in many of his previous performances, he will play choirmaster, inviting every member of the audience to get involved.
“It’s a multi-genre show,” he explains. “It has some structured elements but also some chaotic elements. There’ll be some acoustic moments and some very dance, jazz, folk, electronic and rock ‘n’ roll moments. I love being in an operation that’s very defined and rhythmic, but I also love that feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JACOB COLLIER
- Worst habit? Going to bed at 7am and waking up at 2pm. My sleep schedule is completely upside down.
- Greatest fear? My own apathy. I worry about numbing out to the world in a time of so much change.
- The line that stayed with you? Quincy Jones used to say, “Don’t try to be cool – be warm.”
- Biggest regret? The sacrifices made by the people I love most, to allow me to do what I do. I’m very, very grateful to them.
- Favourite book? Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? September by Earth, Wind & Fire. Can you imagine having written that song? We blast it after every show so that everyone leaves on a high.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? To an Earth, Wind & Fire concert in the 1970s.
During his first tour of Australia in 2018, Collier used a video looping system and specially made harmoniser to perform a one-man concert. “I was using all sorts of gizmos back then, but I’ve since traded a lot of those gadgets for people, which has been of great benefit to me,” he says.
“When I was a solo performer, I fell in love with the idea that, in the absence of bandmates, the audience becomes the band – and that’s still an important part of the show because I love that communal feeling.”
He doesn’t hesitate when asked to name his biggest musical hero.
“My mum is number one, obviously,” he says. “Of all the things I’ve done as a musician – starting with those multiscreen videos, then making albums and travelling all over the world – she’s always lent her expertise and wisdom in a really lovely way. She even conducted the orchestra on my last album, Djesse Vol. 4. It was an amazing, full-circle moment to take the DNA of what I learned as a child and fold it into what I’m doing now.”
Tickets for Jacob Collier’s Djesse World Tour are on sale now at frontiertouring.com/jacobcollier
