WORDS BY STEPHANIA ROMANUIK
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM BENDER
“The only way to learn something is to try it,” declared Jacob Collier to an audience of students at the Centro de Creadores Musicales in Mexico City just ahead of his world tour for Djesse Vol. 4—the final installment of an epic four-album ode to experimentation, learning, and self-expression. At 29 years old, Collier is already a six-time GRAMMY® Award winner and 12-time nominee, whose unpredictable and maximalist musical landscapes offer uncharted territory for even the most experienced listeners.
Diving into the deep waters of Collier’s earliest available YouTube uploads—multi-frame, multi-instrumental originals and covers spanning English carols to Jerome Kern to Stevie Wonder—reveals an artist already extremely proficient in harmonic context with a wide palette of rhythmic influences, curious to try out his own ideas. When his videos began to go viral about ten years ago, Collier was noticed by producer Quincy Jones and, under his mentorship, Collier produced, composed, arranged, recorded, and mixed his debut album In My Room (2016) in his London family home. In addition to singing, Collier performs every instrument featured on the album, including piano, electric and double bass, guitar, ukulele, mandolin, banjo, accordion, drum set, and other percussions—most of which he taught himself to play. In his subsequent international tour, Collier recreated the sound world of the recording by playing and layering 12 instruments including the harmonizer, an electro-acoustic keyboard instrument developed for him by MIT’s Ben Bloomberg, that creates vocal harmonies by sampling Collier’s voice in real-time.
Following his solo tour, Collier was ravenous for collaboration and began developing the idea of a monumental album that would feature as many of his favourite musicians as would agree to collaborate. Over seven subsequent years, the idea transformed into a four-volume series entitled Djesse Vol. 1–4, the final installment of which was released by Hajanga/Interscope/Decca/Universal Music Canada on March 1, 2024. The series title derives from the sounds of Collier’s initials and, again self-produced, truly feels like a blank canvas on which Collier had the courage to play with every colour available to him.
The album opens with “100,000 voices”, in which we’re sonically introduced to Collier’s life beginning with an edited montage of the sounds of touring, collaborating, recording, and an orchestra tuning. In a nod to Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, dubbed “The Symphony of a Thousand”, Collier incorporates recordings of his stadium audiences singing to achieve the feat that the title of the track alludes to. We’re then led into a Coldplay-like pop-rock anthem and, before the song concludes, we take a tumble through the looking glass, colliding with Collier’s musical humour in an unexpected death metal postlude.
Again, like Mahler and the Romantic era, Collier writes as if the 20th and early 21st centuries emptied themselves musically into him. A large swath of the album turns to pop, rock, and R&B influences that derive from his collaborations with gifted vocalists including Lindsey Lonis, Brandi Carlile, sibling duo Lawrence, and Madison Cunningham. “Little Blue” and “Summer Rain” return to the folk songwriting feel of Djesse Vol. 2, although with performances by Collier that have a greater depth of feeling and intimacy with the text that seem informed by ongoing work with vocal collaborators and his own years of experience. As a vocal tone junkie, I particularly enjoyed─and would love to hear more of─Collier’s clear vocal tone in the soaring phrases of “Summer Rain”. Stripped of some of his signature breathiness, here he expresses through the tone itself, as opposed to the shape of the melody or its place in harmonies. To me, the sound is new in the landscape of his earlier recordings and deeply satisfying.
Extended chords and playful jazz influences are heard throughout the album, although standout tracks for me include “A Rock Somewhere” featuring Anoushka Shankar on sitar and Indian classical vocalist Varijashree Venugopal, where a slightly more restrained approach to arrangement spotlights the expressive capacities of the voices and melodic instruments. (As recent collaborations, like the GRAMMY® Award-winning collaboration with the vocal quartet säje might foreshadow, future projects with more externally imposed constraints may similarly allow for greater distillation of Collier’s musical ideas.) “Witness Me” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” both take maximalist approaches to vocal arrangements that are uplifting and invigorating and showcase the prodigious talents of featured vocalists including Tori Kelly, John Legend, and a team of singers led by gospel legend Kirk Franklin.
In “World O World”, the final track of the album and the entire saga, Collier concludes with a return to the Bach chorales he sang with his family growing up. What begins in the style of a simple Lutheran hymn tune develops into a broader range and more complex harmonies, wrapping around all of his listeners in one final, giant, sonic embrace. This embrace doesn’t end with the farewell of the album, however, and threads its way through Collier’s ongoing work as an educator and live performer. He enthusiastically shares his ideas and creative process with others in interviews and masterclasses and improvises not only with his onstage collaborators but in meaningful ways with the audience. Collier can turn an audience into a choir or an organ, as he describes it, by guiding them through three-part voice leading, reaching their own musical climax, further enveloping the world in sound.
In a time of artists aiming to outdo one another with shock value, the album is wholesome, positive, and uplifting─as much a testament to Collier himself as to his formative mentors, including his mother Suzie Collier, a violinist and educator with whom he continues to collaborate. Collier describes his mother as a “great enabler,” someone who offered him the freedom to explore his tastes joyfully and generously. As a result, even a seven-year, four-album framework feels like it can barely contain the musical inventiveness and fruitful imagination of Jacob Collier.
Recommended listening in related directions includes the futurist folk music of sound artist Lyra Pramuk, the reharmonizations and mind-bending chops of Swedish jazz fusion trio Dirty Loops, and composer and bassist Adam Neely’s binge-worthy video essays breaking down new horizons in music and music theory.
Find this and more in our latest print edition — Issue No. 13: