The Collier Effect: Jacob Collier on melody, harmony and learning from his mum, Suzie
‘The language of music is one great big tree, and it just keeps on budding,’ says gifted British musician, YouTube sensation and accidental music teacher Jacob Collier.
As far as a spiky-haired musician named Jacob Collier is concerned, melody is something inherent to being alive. It is simply what happens when you open your mouth.
Harmony is created when many melodies happen at once, he says, weaving a tapestry of sound that can tug at our emotions and remind us of the great thrill of what it means to be human.
If you ask him to address concepts concerning the fundamentals of music, the 28-year-old leans forward and responds with an enthusiasm that is so boundless, so arresting and so free of pretence that it fills you with a sense of wonder.
Let’s call it the Collier Effect: all of a sudden, you find yourself consumed by the urgent desire to hear your favourite songs with fresh ears, and a renewed appreciation for the galaxy of artistic decisions that were made in their creation.
Ask him how he would unpack the difference between melody and harmony for the average music fan, for instance, and he will burst into a beautifully evocative response that is replete with historical knowledge and deep understanding, yet is delivered with effortless command and an infectious sense of playfulness.
“Many of the songs that exist in the world revolve around a series of chords,” he tells Review, naming the likes of F major and D-flat minor while sitting before a keyboard at his home in North London.
“These are lovely chords, and I’ve spent many minutes, days, weeks, months, years exploring how these chords affect each other, and also affect me in stasis,” he says. “Melody sits on the top of a chord, for example, and tells a story over a harmonic area; you can say a ‘key’, which is a sort of centre of gravity in music; but also, many melodies exist together and create harmony.”
Collier goes on to briefly summarise how German composer Johann Sebastian Bach – “one of the biggest legends ever to walk the face of the Earth” – thought about harmony, and how they work together to “create a sort of counterpoint between lots of different elements, and create these wonderfully changing emotional fabrics, moods and curtains of sound”.
Even listening to his voice – surprisingly deep for a man with a beanpole frame – contains a kind of musicality that draws you in. In a conversation with him, you would soon be struck by the realisation that music is so central to his very being that, if you were to inspect his cells under a microscope, you’d find bass notes and treble clefs wrapped around his DNA.
That indelibly memorable chorus lyric from the 1998 hit by US alternative rock band New Radicals, “You’ve got the music in you”? That’s Jacob Collier, through and through.
Born in 1994 and raised chiefly by a single mother named Suzie, an orchestra conductor who taught violin to children in the family home, Collier describes his musical journey as beginning with his first breath; his first melody, if you will.
That house in North London is where he still calls home, at least while not touring. When Review connects with Collier via Zoom in early October, he is on a break between performances, having played 70 concerts this year, with more to come in Europe, Asia and Australia before Christmas.
The camera shows a room jam-packed with guitars, keyboards and percussion instruments, and there can be little doubt that all of them have been played, poked and prodded for their musical properties. Most, if not all of them have appeared on his recordings.
It is to our species’ great benefit that Collier has not been content to satisfy himself by making creative breakthroughs, amassing knowledge and storing it in the great computer inside his skull. Instead, he takes immense pleasure from sharing what he has learned from his deep excavations into music theory to anyone who wants to know.
Perhaps the single best online video in which he stars sees Collier condensing, then expanding, his knowledge of harmony to five different people, from a seven-year-old child up to genius-level US composer Herbie Hancock. “I’m positive that everybody can leave this video with some understanding, at some level,” he says at the beginning.
Across 15 minutes, it is a wholly absorbing masterclass in pairing complex ideas with adroit articulation from a young man who was only a few years into adulthood himself; aged 23 at the time of filming, the clip now has 13 million views.
With a millions-strong following on social media and YouTube, Collier easily ranks among the most popular and best-known music educators alive today. If an educator were all he was, it would be plenty enough – yet containing his essence within the bounds of an adjective or two feels like doing him a disservice.
Ahead of an upcoming Australian tour, even the publicity materials fail to fully capture him: co-promoters Chugg Entertainment and Frontier Touring describe him as a “five-time Grammy Award-winning composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist” – all true, yet somehow, still strangely reductive.
With four albums of original material to his name since his 2016 debut, In My Room – as well as a newly released set of improvised covers recorded on tour this year, titled Piano Ballads – you can also add singer, songwriter and arranger to that list of adjectives.
The nature of his restless creative output and experimentation means Collier has traversed dozens of genres and styles in his recorded work thus far, including the highly ambitious four-part album series, Djesse, of which he has released three volumes since 2018.
Although he has collaborated with major artists including Coldplay, John Mayer and US rapper T-Pain, he hasn’t yet had an identifiable hit song. You’re probably more likely to have stumbled across him while falling down a YouTube recommendations rabbit hole than you are to have heard his music on the radio or on a popular Spotify playlist.
Yet within niche pockets of popular culture – chiefly among teachers, students and music nerds of all stripes – Collier has become a celebrity and a beacon of joy for those who thirst for knowledge. What is his sense, then, of how his skill as a music educator has improved since he has become widely known?
“When I started out, the way that I would explain things was where my head was at with it, which was on quite a deep, fast-moving, complex level,” he replies. “Over the course of the last few years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting so many musicians, and gathering listeners and fans from all corners of the world, who are less within the hardcore musical world, and more within the ‘people of the world’ category, I suppose,” he says with a chuckle. “But seemingly, there are people who still really get a kick out of learning how music fits together, and so I’ve found myself simplifying concepts which may originally have appeared even to me very complicated. I’ve realised that most things in music are actually really simple.”
To demonstrate, he splays his fingers out wide and presses several keys at once, triggering an unusually dissonant yet still uplifting sound, while raising his eyebrows, leaning back and contorting his face into a brief grimace.
“Even a really, really crazy chord like that, you think, ‘What on Earth was that?’,” he says, looking down at the keyboard, before beginning to pick out a couple of its component chords – E-flat major, F-sharp major – then identifying the extra notes he’d chucked in at random.
“You can break any amount of dense complexity down into a simple form,” he continues – and here’s when his real smarts begin to kick in.
In a flash, Collier instinctively makes a move that’s deeply intellectual but still highly accessible: he reaches for a metaphorical flower, an everyday object that can be observed in whole from a distance at its most simple form.
Yet if you pick up a magnifying glass for a closer look, he says, you’ll see finer details, which will get you thinking about the function of the flower’s constituent parts, and how they have evolved to attract a particular creature or energy, so the organism can continue to live and spread its DNA.
Simple, right?
This use of an everyday metaphor reinforces the scaffolding of his musical demonstration, thus using an image to create a harmony that accompanies the top-line melody of his voice. The overall effect is that the listener – or in this case you, the reader – is more likely to understand and internalise the lesson. It’s a move done so subtly, so cleverly, that you almost feel like you discovered it yourself.
“The way that I’ve thought about music has deepened and simplified,” he says. “I think it started on a ravenously fascinated level, trying to understand really deep and crazy concepts. Over the years, I’m getting more and more of a hefty kick out of something being done so beautifully, with all of the depth that supports it from the rich and complex world, but actually expressed in an incredibly simple way.”
To synthesise tricky artistic ideas to the layperson – particularly in a gentle, lighthearted manner that doesn’t make it feel like you’re being told to eat your vegetables – is a mighty fine talent.
When Review compliments his rare gift for communicating in this way, noting it may be his greatest contribution so far, Collier replies with a smile. “Thanks so much for saying that. It’s a lovely thing to hear. I actually feel quite a huge amount of relief when I express an idea to someone, and they understand it, because I almost feel like I don’t have to be the only one to try and explore it.”
“There’s so much to explore in this world – so many lifetimes worth of exploration, even to the simplest of concepts – that it’s almost like I’m relieving myself of the burden of some of this stuff,” he says with a laugh.
Collier gets a huge kick out of seeing others explore an idea he’s shared with them, and he conjures another memorable image to illustrate: “It’s almost like my limbs are continuing through the arms and legs of people around me, in the same way I’m continuing the limbs of people who have come before me; people who I used to look up to as a child, like Stevie Wonder, Sting, Bach, Bobby McFerrin or Freddie Mercury.”
“I used to think, ‘How do you do that?’. You gauge, through osmosis, their process – and then you just keep extending their limbs,” he says.
“To use a tree analogy: the language of music is one great big tree, and it just keeps on budding – and the more you’re willing to give and share, the more comes back to you.”
There is one essential figure hovering in the background of his story, to whom the musician refers several times during our conversation: Suzie Collier, who describes herself in her Instagram bio as – note the order – “mother-violinist-teacher-conductor-podcaster”.
All through his rise from viral fame nine years ago – after posting a layered, harmonised, multi-instrumental arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing in October 2013 – through to his present reality, as a globetrotting performer for tens of thousands of fans, Suzie has been his heartbeat.
On tour this year, she has made several guest appearances to duet with her son with her violin, and her arrival is greeted with a roof-raising cheer from his rapt devotees. It’s easy to see why: she is the woman who gave him life, then gave him music – which gave him to the world.
What does it mean to him to share the stage with his mum? Few queries seem to stump this inordinately articulate man, but for a moment he looks around the music-packed room, trying to summon the right words to capture an ineffable feeling wrapped in a lifetime of memories.
“It takes me back to my earliest moments of being a human; being a couple of days old, and having her play the violin to me,” he says. “Growing up, the feeling of her teaching students in the house was the most familiar sound I ever heard. I’d come home from school, or wake up in the morning, and I’d hear that from the next room. It’s just beautiful.”
That’s the simple, seven-year-old-child-level response to my emotional question; the branches of the tree, to recycle his analogy. The deeper meaning – the root structure – is what he describes next, though.
What performing with his mum before thousands of people as a 28-year-old man really reminds him of is her unique ability to extract things from her students that even they didn’t know they could do, while still feeling like they were the ones who found the solution.
That was Suzie’s master touch as a teacher, and still is, he says with a proud smile. When she walks on to a stage to perform with her son, she is the living embodiment of all that wisdom and knowledge. The room dissolves, the man feels like he’s a boy again, and the two of them are just playing around, in love with music and with each other.
Jacob Collier’s Australian tour begins in Adelaide (December 1) and ends in Brisbane (December 10). Piano Ballads – Live from the Djesse World Tour 2022 is out now via Decca/Universal.
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