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Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

As a semi-professional jazz nerd, he's absolutely "got it" in the majority of tracks he records. "Right now", his appeal is to folks who understand all of the tricks in modern contemporary harmony, and his payoff is that he subverts it in "the Jacob Collier style". His burden is how/when is he going to figure out how to invoke that frisson in the average (non jazz-nerd) listener. See: Steely Dan, Frank Zappa, Herbie Hancock, and others.

I am reasonably confident people are going to be dissecting Jacob Collier harmonic choices in the 2100s and beyond, similar to how we dissect John Williams, Charlie Parker, Jaco Pastorius, and other modern composers today.

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I guess I am the most unimpressed with his covers. To me, his harmonic choices and reharmonizations are always on the side of complexity rather than aural pleasure. I just want him to do more original stuff.

FWIW, I find the Adam Neely/Sungazer work more listenable, so its not a dislike of covers, but I also don’t enjoy taking the melody out of things just to substitute functional harmonies.

That's the "Jacob Collier Thing" though. Consider that he's doing 'complicated' reharms, but with significantly more emphasis on microtonality.

For the average listener, it's not so much that he's "putting the harm in reharmonization", but that he's tastefully (to the western ear) being _specifically_ sharp or flat (depending on the original key - hence 'microtonality') in a way that he is gambling is more appealing to the western ear trained/developed in western music.

People said literally the same things about bebop in the 40s. Complex reharmonizations with wild new ideas over well known pop songs. But now that Charlie Parker's ideas have become integrated into the norm it doesn't seem adventurous or sacrificing soul for complexity.

Collier will be the same in 50 years.

I appreciate your perspective, but I'm not sure whether you're deeming me unqualified to pass an opinion or what? (Sorry. lol) I'm a lifelong musician, so I absolutely appreciate and respect Collier's technique. But I don't think it's beyond reason to say that I yearn for emotional substance in his work. I have always considered frisson to be invoked from both a technical and emotional balance in music. It is not just mechanical. That said, emotion is a subjective experience. Collier certainly has the technical prowess and he uses it heavily, but he seems to lack a mature emotional component. Paraphrasing the original commenter, it's not that Jacob can't get there but I am looking forward to when he does reach that point.

> people are going to be dissecting Jacob Collier harmonic choices in the 2100s

I hope so! He's nothing short of prodigy.

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