Music-Making with Jacob Collier

About the Workshop

“Imagine a Prince, a Michael Jackson…a Yo-Yo Ma. Imagine to be able to work with that kind of young artist.”— Frederick Harris, Jr., Director of Wind and Jazz Ensembles at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Jacob Collier was an artist-in-residence

Jacob Collier, a twenty-six-year old often described as a “musician’s musician,” catapulted to fame in 2016 after the release of the album In My Room, recorded from his bedroom and building on his reputation for creative, multi-track covers self-released on his YouTube channel. Today, he is considered a prodigy and is lauded as “jazz music’s new messiah” (The Guardian).

Jason King, writing for NPR Music, says: “A precocious North Londoner and conservatory-trained jazz pianist, Collier seems to have no creative limits. Besides gleefully tinkling the ivories, he plays a cornucopia of instruments like electric bass and double bass, drums and percussion, melodica, guitar and ukulele, and he’s also not afraid to go ham on the accordion, mandolin, bouzouki, dulcimer, tabla, autoharp and banjo. He has a lithe tenor, informed by pre-adolescent turns in operatic productions like Turn of the Screw and Wozzeck. He’s awfully fond of stacking his own vocals via multi-track technologies like loop pedals and harmonizers (the latter are custom-built in tandem with MIT graduate student Ben Bloomberg); he can also play these technologies live.”

In 2018, Collier launched a four-part jazz album series titled Djesse. Djesse 3, released in August 2020, has been nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year. Collier is a five-time Grammy winner and seven-time nominee.

Join Jacob Collier to understand his music-making process, peek “behind the scenes” of his home recording studio, and for the chance to ask this rising legend your questions.