Jacob Collier

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Re: Jacob Collier

Post by Hermit » Mon Feb 11, 2019 12:46 am

Animavore wrote:
Sun Feb 10, 2019 12:03 pm
It's not that I don't find him impressive, I do, he's just not really my cup of tea. When it comes to self-published and produced, multi-instrumentalists I'm more into Gautier Serre right now. Though you're far less likely to hear him on the radio as he doesn't tick the pop boxes.
It's Gotye for me. He writes his own songs, which Collier has not done so far. His music is also more substantial. It goes somewhere, and he does not bother with all that gratuitous glitter. Gotye's music is by no means my favourite, but I do enjoy listening to it from time to time.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould

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Brian Peacock
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Re: Jacob Collier

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon Feb 11, 2019 3:05 am

Rum wrote:
Sat Feb 09, 2019 11:47 pm
I don’t know if you know anything about music theory, but amongst other things this lad is inventing new chords.
I know a bit about music theory, so I'm calling a big "Meh" on this.

Don't get me wrong - I think he's a real talent and he'll probably mature into an important figure at the intersection of Jazz with other genres on the broader musical venn diagram. But unless he's working in anything other than standard temperament he's not inventing new chords.

In the West we have used 12 notes per octave, tuned in so-called twelve-tone equal temperament, since the 1700s. This is how instruments have been made for c.250 years, and how the tuning of those instruments in relation to each other works so that people can play together in the same sono-harmonic environment. Historically things like tuning and the resulting harmony were not so fixed (suggest vids on Just, Even, Meantone, and Well Tempered tuning), and other cultures employ different systems of tuning all together of course - such as West African or East Asian music - but Collier's music, while interesting, is not harmonically distinctive in that kind of way.

One should also keep in mind that a chord is a musical element contextualised by its use in music - otherwise it'd just be a sound - so at most Collier's using non-standard harmonic progressions and structures. Or, being the Jazzy young fellow he is, he's just developing his own musical style like Jazzers do - using the same basic tools, the same language and grammar, to express an individual musical voice. If he's creating 'new chords' it's only in the way that a novelist creates 'new sentences' to serve the purposes of their work - and there's nothing new in that.

Still, it's a pretty fascinating area of music practice and theory. This might be interesting to you...



And besides - Collier stole most of his voicings from Herbie Hancock anyway. :D
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Animavore
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Re: Jacob Collier

Post by Animavore » Fri Nov 22, 2019 5:05 pm

He knows his shit anyway, I think. I haven't got much of a grasp what he's talking about here.

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