Jacob Collier at The Factory in Deep Ellum

To begin wrapping your mind around Jacob Collier, the wizardly English singer-songwriter-arranger-producer, the place to start is not a recording or a music video or a concert. You need to check out a lecture. On the internet, you can find dozens of examples of Collier in professorial mode, or as professorial as it gets for a guy whose wardrobe leans to rainbow-colored Crocs and hats with ears. There are videos of him conducting master classes at the Berklee College of Music and the University of Southern California. There are clips of him explicating the harmonic structure of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke.” There are the Logic Breakdown Sessions, in which he examines his own music at the molecular level, walking step by step through the construction of his songs. Collier is a star who has toured the world and won four Grammys — he is nominated for three more in 2021, including Album of the Year — yet he is most in his when he faces a lecture-hall audience or a laptop camera and plumbs the deeps of music theory, holding forth on plagal cadences, time signatures in Bulgarian folk music and his own esoteric innovations, such as the continually modulating musical scale he has named the Super-Ultra-Hyper-Mega-Meta-Lydian. Collier is 26, but with his baby face and string- limbs, he looks little different than he did nearly a decade ago, when videos showcasing his virtuosity first circulated online. One was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” featuring Collier on keyboards, guitar, bouzouki, double bass and percussion. His one-man-band skills were outrageous. (He studied in prestigious conservatories and was raised in a musical household.) But what really stood out was the song’s harmonic intricacy: a multi-tracked chorale of Colliers, swerving through jazzy extensions and gnarly near-dissonances that resolved in surprising ways. The video caught the attention of Quincy Jones, who signed the teenager to a management deal. Four albums have followed, including the current Grammy nominee, “Djesse Vol. 3” — Collier’s most pop-facing record, in which he strives to marry the heady stuff of those master classes with the kind of R.&B. that makes hits.

– nytimes.com