If happiness is a solid and joy a liquid — as J.D. Salinger once wrote — the Collier experience flows like a lava lamp.

by Peter Dobrin | The Philadelphia Inquirer

Somewhere on the way to notching seven Grammy Awards, Jacob Collier picked up another, less official distinction: perhaps the most artistically polyamorous musician on Earth. The British multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, and producer has collaborated with Ty Dolla $ign and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and draws on jazz as readily as the classical sampling technique of musique concrète.

Collier also writes his own charts for the occasional appearance with symphony orchestra — a soundscape for which he has “absorbed orchestrational wisdom from a lot of my heroes — everyone from Quincy Jones to Ravel to Stravinsky and going back to Bach and Benjamin Britten and all these kinds of people,” he said in a recent interview.

For his Aug. 7 appearance at the Mann Center with the newly reconstituted Philly Pops, Collier works with an artist he considers to be the world’s greatest conductor, and someone he’s known every second of his 30 years.

“It’s only been a couple of times that we’ve shared this dynamic of Suzie on the podium and Jacob on the stage at the front,” he says of his professional relationship with his mother, “but it’s a really profound kind of thing to get to be a part of.”

Suzie Collier, the Royal Academy of Music-educated conductor, violinist, and pedagogue, said that performing with her son is, in some ways, the same as with any other musician. But it also means that “a small look or a subtle word or a movement from me will be understood in a more direct way and will need less explaining,” she said. “It’s very automatic how we switch in to each other, and it doesn’t matter how tired we are or what’s been happening. ... Once we’re creating and making that music, we’re just on a different plane, quite seriously.”

Jacob Collier has been watching his mother conduct orchestras since he was “tiny-tiny, and I think the kind of lessons that I witnessed were … more so human lessons than I would say musical lessons.”

For him, there’s no distinction between the musical and the human. He’s all about connecting.

Sometimes he turns the tables on the audience, enthusing them into an enormous choir. In a recent concert with the National Symphony Orchestra, he took a page from singer-songwriter Ben Folds by conjuring, on the spot, a new composition from the ensemble and audience, leaving everyone with a lesson in the normally shrouded process of how composition happens, and the emotional power of harmony, rhythm, and instrumental color.

If George Bernard Shaw unlocked the mysteries of Wagner through evocative 19th-century prose and Leonard Bernstein seized television to become the great explainer of classical music during the blossoming of culture in mid-20th-century America, there is a sense with Collier that he has figured out a way into the healthy but seemingly random curiosities of today’s emerging audiences, like the millions on TikTok and Instagram who follow him.

“I’ve really enjoyed growing up in the 21st century as a musician. I think there’s a sort of ravaging openness and an infinity to it,” said Collier.

“We have now at our disposal a whole manner of different ways of messaging about music, whether it’s through technology, through social media, through the internet, but also through the stage there are just kind of new paradigms that as a writer, as a performer, as an artist, and human in general, I’m enjoying and witnessing.

“So I think it’s probably the most important time to make music.”

He feels we’re still in a post-COVID phase that left isolation in its wake — “you know, people sitting on their phones just all day long” — and music represents a return to community.

“It’s a challenging place for a lot of people, but also so full of beauty and so full of significance. I think what music can do is it can move our attention toward those parts of the world that remind us of how special life can be and how special each other are.”

If happiness is a solid and joy a liquid — as J.D. Salinger once wrote — the Collier experience flows like a lava lamp. The unpredictability of it is captivating. His music is essentially upbeat, though it is often not without an edge.

On the 21 tracks of Djesse Vol. 4 (deluxe), no song sounds like any other — or even from the same era. Tori Kelly, John Legend, and powerful choral forces give a velvety-gospel account of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that grows into a climax of brilliant light. Madison Cunningham and Chris Thile are the soul of contentment in “Summer Rain.” Brandi Carlile and Collier meet at a particularly mellow corner of the universe in his own song, “Little Blue.”

Collier incorporates the voices of more than 100,000 audience members on the album — the same kind of mass participation he cherishes in live concerts.

“By equalizing that dynamic in the room, amazing things can happen,” he says.

Joy and openness, a remarkable vocal range, and an all-are-welcome spirit are qualities he shares with an artistic ancestor, Bobby McFerrin, the one-time Philadelphian whose preternaturally virtuosic vocalism began dazzling listeners in the 1980s. It’s no accident.

“We as a family were so influenced by Bobby and still are,” said Suzie Collier. “He is so important to us. At that time he was doing things for people that had never been done before. He was introducing the idea of circle songs, which have been going for hundreds and hundreds of years in different parts of the world, but bringing it to the kind of Western moneyed civilization that we happen to live in. And it absolutely blew everybody’s minds, and of course, Jacob and I, we’ve taken these ideas and we’ve used them and enabled them to fly.”

Suzie Collier was intentional in shaping Jacob’s musical training — or perhaps intentionally unintentional.

“I did not want to say to Jacob that he needed to learn in a particular kind of a way or he needed to have lessons with a particular person or by this stage, he should really be achieving certain things if he was going to make it in the musical profession,” she said. “I knew there was something astonishing from the moment he could tap a rhythm or sing a note — it was quite clearly there. So then it was a question of saying, ‘Here are these things, here are these sounds. Do you want to interact with that? How do you see this? How do you hear this?’ I hope that I was able to open his world up and guide him into his own intuition to learn. He may not have had a zillion lessons, but he does his own hard work really in a very, very major way. And so to that extent, I feel that the idea of just him being guided to be himself maybe was what he needed. I won’t know that for a few years. We’ll have to just wait and see.”

Collier says that the next step in his artistic evolution — given the fact that it’s hard to top a release featuring 100,000 performers — might be going small.

“I’m the kind of musician who enjoys playing a variety of instruments, and when I come to Philly, I’ll be playing a veritable gamut of instruments alongside the orchestra, which is one of my favorite things to do with such bodies of people. But I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that you could really zone into one particular instrument. Maybe it’s the piano, maybe it’s the guitar.”

He is a “firm believer that you can render infinity out of infinity, clearly, but you can also render infinity out of something quite small and much more defined, and so I’m excited at embracing such limitations. I think really interesting things could happen.”

Jacob and Suzie Collier at the Mann Center
The Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist performs with his mother, conductor and violinist Suzie Collier, alongside the Philly Pops.

📅 Aug. 7, 8 p.m.,📍 Mann Center, 5201 Parkside Ave., 🎟️ Tickets and info: manncenter.org

(via The Philadelphia Inquirer)