jazz

Jacob Collier

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London multi-instrumentalist who came up posting split-screen videos of himself singing every part. Live, he conducts the whole room into a choir.

Jacob Collier grew up in a musical household in north London. His mother, Suzie Collier, is a violinist and conductor at the Royal Academy of Music's Junior Academy, and his grandfather, Derek Collier, was a violinist there too. He is of Chinese descent through his maternal grandmother. As a boy he sang treble in classical opera roles, including Mozart's The Magic Flute and Britten's The Turn of the Screw, and later attended the Purcell School before briefly studying jazz piano at the Royal Academy.

He started posting videos to YouTube in which he sang and played every part himself, arranged in a grid of split screens. His covers of standards and pop songs, stacked with dense harmony and chords that slide well outside conventional tuning, drew the attention of Quincy Jones, who took on his management.

His records pull jazz harmony, gospel voicing, funk and folk into the same arrangements, often with Collier handling nearly all the instruments and vocals himself. His debut album, In My Room, released in 2016, was recorded, arranged and produced in the back room of his family home in Finchley. He went on to build Djesse, a four-volume project spanning 2018 to 2024 that brought in more than two dozen guest artists and ensembles.

Onstage he plays piano, bass, guitar and drums, sometimes through a custom harmoniser, and splits the audience into sections to sing three- and four-part chords back at him.

Collier won Grammy Awards for his arrangements on each of his first four Djesse-era albums, including his takes on the Flintstones theme, Stevie Wonder's 'You and I' and 'Moon River', making him the first British artist to receive a Grammy for every one of his first four records. In 2025 he extended that run to five consecutive albums.

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