Collier is a star who has toured the world and won four Grammys - he is nominated for three more in 2021, including Album of the Year - yet he is most in his element when he faces a lecture-hall audience or a laptop camera and plumbs the deeps of music theory, holding forth on plagal cadences, time signatures in Bulgarian folk music and his own esoteric innovations, such as the continually modulating musical scale he has named the Super-Ultra-Hyper-Mega-Meta-Lydian.Ĭollier is 26, but with his baby face and string-bean limbs, he looks little different than he did nearly a decade ago, when videos showcasing his virtuosity first circulated online. There are clips of him explicating the harmonic structure of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke.” There are the Logic Breakdown Sessions, in which he examines his own music at the molecular level, walking step by step through the construction of his songs. There are videos of him conducting master classes at the Berklee College of Music and the University of Southern California. On the internet, you can find dozens of examples of Collier in professorial mode, or as professorial as it gets for a guy whose wardrobe leans to rainbow-colored Crocs and hats with ears.
To begin wrapping your mind around Jacob Collier, the wizardly English singer-songwriter-arranger-producer, the place to start is not a recording or a music video or a concert.