English singer-songwriter Jacob Collier created an unforgettable moment at his O2 Academy show in London where he turned thousands of audience members into a single choir. The 29-year-old musician conducted the audience in a spontaneous mass performance and created a beautiful piece of music on the spot.
The O2 Academy Brixton has a capacity of nearly 5000 and to hear so many people join their voices together is just magical. Collier had the audience create a three-part harmony across a four minute performance, as you can hear in the video below.
The performance was captured in June 2022 as part of the homecoming show for Collier’s Djesse world tour, which was promoting his four-part album of the same name, three of which have been released so far. Fans watching the video were definitely aware that something special was captured that night, with comments like “Absolutely magical. Instant tears.”
Collier is a London-based musician who has been making a real splash on YouTube as well as with his original music, due to his highly original ideas and outside of the box approach. A great example of this is his cover of Stevie Wonder’s soul hit “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing”, which you can watch below. For the first half of the video Collier performs the entire song acapella, recreating the instruments with his voice across a six-way split screen.
Collier has a real knack for quirky musical ideas and his channel is full of creative and unique content, which shows off not only his singing and musicianship, but also his skills with videography and audio production. His music is based in jazz and R&B, although he brings a wide variety of influences into his work. He has music in his blood as his mother is a conductor, violinist and professor at the London Royal Academy of Music, where Collier himself also briefly studied jazz piano.
The young musician made an impact on YouTube quite early in his musical career. Collier made the Stevie Wonder cover above when he was just 19, and the song went viral, having collected 6.1 million views since then.
Collier has since gone from strength to strength, moving beyond YouTube and becoming a hit-maker in the US and making appearances on records made by huge names. The biggest name Collier has worked with so far is Coldplay. He co-wrote two songs on the band’s 2019 album Everyday Life, as well as contributing backing vocals to three tracks. He’s since worked with the band on two more songs on their follow-up album Music of the Spheres, one of which was the BTS collab “My Universe”.
Other notable collaborations for the talented Brit include co-writing and singing on SZA and Alicia Keys songs, appearing on “Good Days” and “Old Memories (Unlocked)” respectively, as well as playing piano on the latter. In between all this hobnobbing with megastars, Collier has also found time to work on his own music, with his first two albums In My Room and Djesse Vol. 1 topping the US Contemporary Jazz chart.
If you would like to see more from Jacob Collier, you can subscribe to his YouTube channel or follow him on Facebook.