As if by design, British wunderkind Jacob Collier has become the Arts & Lectures (A&L) bookend man this season. The uniquely gifted singer/songwriter/arranger/keyboard wizard and populist conceptualist showed up in solo mode last fall at Campbell Hall. Back then, Collier was the opening act of the UCSB Arts & Lectures series. On Sunday, May 19, Collier returns in fully dressed, full-band mode at the Arlington Theatre, this time as a late-booking finale of A&L’s season. Some kind of symmetry principle is at work here.
The contrasting double play bookings also amount to a Collier coup for the host organization, given his wildly expanding fan base. His previous appearance here came while he was in the “neighborhood,” playing the Hollywood Bowl — his Arlington show is part of a promotional tour for his ambitious Djesse Vol. 4 album, including such roomy venues as the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles the following night. On tour, his opening act is another ambitious pop style-bender, the New Zealander Kimbra, who has worked with Collier, as on the exhilarant “In My Bones,” from Djesse Vol. 3.
An SRO crowd showed up at Campbell Hall to catch his solo show, consisting of only his voice, piano, and a synthesizer, plus a surprisingly game and flexible audience sing-along component (the “audience choir” in Collier world parlance). His devoted fans get the benefit of the artist’s killer genius for layering vocal parts, spontaneously and otherwise. And yet, while Collier’s solo show steered away from his original connection to the jazz scene and veered into the realm of hip piano lounge music, the Collier operation goes big and wide in Djesse mode.
Like the earlier Djesse projects (“djesse” reportedly referring to his initials JC), Djesse Vol. 4 finds Collier creating an eclectic and epic canvas of an album, with tightly structured tunes blended in with quick detours and interludes. Sampling a single song — say, the current single “Little Blue,” a pleasant pop ballad in duet with Brandi Carlile — doesn’t necessarily prepare the listeners for Collier’s many directional turns. The album opens with the Peter Gabriel–ish art-pop splash of “100,000 Voices,” itself a compact concept piece which, in its last minute, heads to Brazil briefly and then into an alt-metal howl zone.
Collier’s career took off in 2012 on the basis of still-dazzling arrangements of Stevie Wonder and other covers gone viral on YouTube, created in elaborate home studio arrangements. Since then, and from early one-man band performances at jazz festivals and elsewhere, Collier has blasted out of his bedroom and his self-reliant house of mirrors and expanded his collaborative web. He has collaborated with a broad array of artists in the past decade, and the list of respectfully treated guests on Djesse Vol. 4 includes John Legend (on a luscious version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”), Camilo (“Mi Corazón”), Coldplay’s Chris Martin (“Over You”), brainy Americana artists Madison Cunningham and Chris Thile (“Summer Rain”), Anoushka Shankar, and Santa Barbara’s own Michael McDonald.
This time out, the generally inspirational and positive outlook Collier tends to embrace leads to the motherlode of gospel music, enlisting gospel star Kirk Franklin and a hyper-nimble gospel choir effect on the climactic tune “Box of Stars Pt. 1.” A second version of “Box of Stars” finds Collier’s instrumental arrangement savvy in action, featuring the famed Dutch Metropole Orkest and guitar hero Steve Vai, artfully wailing before an orchestral resolution reminiscent of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” ending.
Voices, in elaborately coordinated fashion, have the final word, with the lovely a cappella maze of “World O World.” Here, Collier’s youthful roots show, when he sang Bach Chorales with his violinist-conductor mother and other family members. It’s back to Bach-ishness, in the end. Collier, now all of 29, has been carving out a career and musical mega-identity both inventive and on his terms, and respectful of the wide world of music history. As of this season, Collier has dramatically broken into the 805 zone.
Jacob Collier performs at the Arlington Theatre on Sunday, May 19, at 7 p.m. See artsandlectures.ucsb.edu for tickets and info.
