Jacob Collier: A playful approach to creating music

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Grammy winner Jacob Collier has been called a musical phenomenon; his work is full of joy and spontaneity. He makes a case for why we should emphasize play, passion, and curiosity over practice.

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MANOUSH ZOMORODI, HOST:

It's the TED Radio hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today, Part 2 of our series Work, Play, Rest. We're examining the fundamental ways that we spend our time and how they're changing, including what it means to play. And we're going to start with some music.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: This is from a performance on the TED stage in 2017.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: Listening to this performance, you might not guess that all of these instruments are being played by one single musician, who is practically leaping across the stage. He's here for a second on the drums. Then suddenly, he's upright at his bass, and then over to the keyboard. And he is just totally joyous, playful. That musician is Jacob Collier.

JACOB COLLIER: What's up, everyone?

ZOMORODI: (Laughter) Hey. We were just talking about you.

COLLIER: Yeah. What's this I'm hearing? What's this madness?

ZOMORODI: Oh, you know, the usual.

COLLIER: (Laughter).

ZOMORODI: Why don't - let's start by having you introduce yourself. Tell us your name and what you do.

COLLIER: So hello. My name is Jacob. I'm from North London. I am a multi-instrumentalist. So I play a few different instruments. And I'm also a producer and a songwriter, and an arranger and composer, and a performer and a few other things besides. But mainly, I'm just a human being.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

COLLIER: (Singing) I was walking down the line, trying to find some peace of mind.

ZOMORODI: Something Jacob is so modestly not sharing is that he's also a five-time Grammy Award winner, and he's only 27.

Jacob, exactly how many instruments do you play? Like, what do you have at your fingertips right now, right this second, that you could throw into a song if you wanted to?

COLLIER: Oh, well, I've got my voice, which is the main one (vocalizing). And voices do so many different kinds of things. And I'm a huge fan. Then I've got this...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

COLLIER: ...Which is just a midi keyboard.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

COLLIER: And I can play notes on it like that, which is cool. I don't know if you can hear this...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: Oh, yeah.

COLLIER: ...But this is a bass guitar. So that's a bit of a friendly beastie. And let me just pick up this as well. This is an acoustic guitar. In fact, it's a five-string acoustic guitar, which is a little uncommon.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

COLLIER: And so it's what I just described, perhaps, plus drums. So you've got things that make rhythm. You've got things that make harmony. You've got things that make melody. And then you've got things that make sound. And within those four families of kind of musical creation objects, I find myself never bored, you know, never un-fascinated by the potential of what music could do.

ZOMORODI: And we should say that you are speaking to us from your home in London, from a very special room where you compose your music. Can you tell us about it?

COLLIER: Oh, the magical room. Well, I'm extremely lucky in many senses, I feel. And one of those is that I've always lived in the same house for my whole life. This room was where it all began for me. And it's mainly because this is the room where the piano lives. And pianos are fascinating things for children. Specifically, for me, I found it utterly magnetic, the idea that you could sit and basically play all music that had ever been made with these black-and-white keys and it was just a matter of uncovering it.

And so I spent a lot of time here just kind of seeking my own goosebumps, I suppose, really kind of drilling into the things that freaked me out the most and made me the most delighted. And I just got more and more fascinated and more and more thrilled by the kinds of emotional results that you could achieve just through sound and through storytelling, all from the comfort of my own home.

ZOMORODI: I also started on piano. And I was told I needed to practice for 45 minutes every day.

COLLIER: Ah.

ZOMORODI: And I'm not - I'm sad to say that I don't play anymore. And I hated it.

COLLIER: Yeah.

ZOMORODI: But it sounds like you got different directions or prompts.

COLLIER: Well, I did. I do remember being offered piano lessons, which I politely declined.

ZOMORODI: Oh.

COLLIER: Very polite, but I did say...

ZOMORODI: (Laughter) Aww (ph).

COLLIER: ...You know what? I want to keep exploring this on my own terms, which was, actually, really well-received. I was essentially brought up by my mom on her own. And so she had this kind of extraordinary attitude about learning, which really came from play rather than practice. And I think it's an interesting thing to think about and talk about because it's hard to draw the line between those two.

ZOMORODI: Yeah.

COLLIER: And certain things you need to practice in order to be able to do them. And other things, I think, are better discovered through just the process of kind of sniffing out what feels really good. And both sides have existed for me ever since I began the world of music, however conscious I've been of either process. But much to my kind of delight and gratitude, looking back, I was really enabled to make my own world and design my own learning process in this room kind of for myself.

ZOMORODI: I mean, what you describe sounds like the essence of what's wonderful about being a child, is discovery and experimentation while you play and wonder. But how have you managed to hold onto that as you've become a professional musician, as you've gotten older? I mean, and that is the word that so many people use to describe your music is playful, joyous.

COLLIER: Oh, that's really lovely. It's funny, I still don't really think of myself as a professional musician, even though that sounds kind of strange to say out loud.

ZOMORODI: (Laughter).

COLLIER: I don't think I'm that professional. I mean, I sort of - there are certain things that I've gotten very good at. But I think that, in some ways, there's something very sterile inherently about the word professional because it sort of means that you stop learning. And I feel like, in general, the more I figure out, the more there is to be figured out. I don't feel, by any stretch, you know, well, I finished that now, you know? I don't need to do any more of that - because I think that once you've understood a certain angle or a certain corner or a certain kind of concept or structure within it, then it just reveals the one beneath it or the one above it, you could say.

So something someone once said - I can't remember who it was. But they said something like, you know, the creative adult is the child who survived, which I think is kind of true, you know? I mean, every child, I'd like to think, goes into the world of education and learning with a totally open mind. And it's very, very difficult to kind of come out the other side with that curiosity intact because it's exceptionally easy for people to shut it down.

ZOMORODI: As kids, play comes naturally. It's what children do. But as we grow older, play gets replaced with work and obligations. We often forget about doing something just because it's plain old fun and because it can spark the unexpected. So today on the show, the surprising power of play, how it can fuel creativity, be an antidote to despair and even help us find our way in the world. For Jacob Collier, all he wanted to do as a kid was play around with music. And as he grew up, his obsession grew, too.

COLLIER: You know, I'd learn a song or listen to something or whatever, and I'd bring it back home, and then I would recreate my own kind of spin on it. Maybe I'd record the song and then I'd reverse it. You know, that's always a fascinating thing, especially for me when I was, like, 12 or 13. I used to play a game with my friend where we would say a word - you'd say something like, good afternoon, and then you'd reverse it and it would be like, (unintelligible). And then you'd learn how to say the reversed version. You'd say (unintelligible), and then you'd reverse that and see how close you were.

ZOMORODI: I love it.

COLLIER: Which was a really lovely, kind of niche game, I suppose. But it was so interesting, and all these tools were brand-new, and I didn't understand what on Earth I was doing, but I wanted to find out.

ZOMORODI: So eventually, all this playing around, it turned into sharing your music with the world online, performing for crowds. At what point did that happen?

COLLIER: Well, I would say performance and sharing happened at different times for me personally. There was about a three- or four-year window where I didn't play any songs live. I just released them as I created them. And those songs back then, those arrangements and songs, were kind of mosaics of sorts. You know, they were lots and lots of different ingredients...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SLEEPING ON MY DREAMS")

COLLIER: (Singing) You've been feeling like you're running away.

...All combining together to make a kind of quite intricate structure. So it was, you know, lots of different voices and lots of different stringed instruments and bass instruments and drums and various things that you wouldn't call an instrument, but they are definitely instruments, like badminton rackets and saucepans and things like that.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SLEEPING ON MY DREAMS")

COLLIER: (Singing) So I decided to remember your name.

And they'd all fit together to make this tapestry of sound. It was quite hard to play it live.

ZOMORODI: Saucepans, did you just say?

COLLIER: Oh, I said saucepans. Do you have saucepans?

ZOMORODI: We do. We call them saucepans. And so...

COLLIER: OK.

ZOMORODI: Wait. You're playing those. Those are in your room. Are they there right now?

COLLIER: Oh, yeah, yeah. There's one up on the shelf here.

(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO KEYS CLANGING)

ZOMORODI: Uh-oh (ph). Are you OK, Jacob?

COLLIER: Sorry. I had to stand on the piano to get it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SAUCEPAN RINGING)

COLLIER: That's what it sounds like.

(SOUNDBITE OF SAUCEPAN RINGING)

ZOMORODI: Oh.

COLLIER: It's a good one - isn't it? - kind of like an agogo.

ZOMORODI: Yeah.

COLLIER: So anyway, you know, these things all kind of had their place. But when it came to, you know, how am I going to play this stuff live, it was a really interesting challenge because I've never really considered having a traditional kind of band, and I kind of felt like the world I was making kind of needed its own degree of performance structure. And we started to mess around with a few different things. And the first thing I really wanted to build was this instrument called the vocal harmonizer. And the vocal harmonizer that we built is an instrument that basically enables me to sing a note and play a number of notes on a keyboard. And what comes out of the instrument is the sound of my voice but singing all of the notes that I play. So it's kind of like I'm a spontaneous choir.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

COLLIER: (Vocalizing). How's everybody feeling today? You feeling good?

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Yeah.

COLLIER: Fantastic. Would everybody mind singing with me for just one second? Could you sing something? Could you just sing a D? Sing, ooh. Everyone sing, ooh.

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) Ooh.

COLLIER: (Vocalizing) Louder, sing it louder.

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) Ooh.

COLLIER: Sing (vocalizing), sing (vocalizing). Now, please, if you could sing (vocalizing).