Jacob Collier Finds The Simple In The Complex

The multi-instrumentalist Grammy winner on virtuosity, Quincy Jones and coming to India

- Anurag Tagat

AT SOME POINT during a half hour chat with British composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier, he gets a bit meta talking about jazz’s place in the world. “We improvise all the time, I’m improvising right now. It’s based on a language I’ve learned. Jazz is like a study of how to improvise as well, which I think is a really good skill for human beings,” he says over the phone from his home in North London.

In the course of the last decade or so, the 25-year-old went from YouTube wunderkind to a must-hear versatile artist who could sing in a manner that’s perform beyond smooth and pitch-perfect and arrange songs old and new to breathe a new life into them. After all, he won two Grammy awards in 2017 for his arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “You and I” and the theme to The Flintstones, a beloved cartoon show. With his earlier covers and reworks, Collier became part of the wave of A Cappella artists who would split screens and perform incredible vocal-only versions of songs. He says, “I might add some crazy rhythms or crazy grooves, chords or melodies, but the most important thing is that the spirit of that song remains as it was born. However, the way I fell in love with it as a kid is maintained.”