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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.

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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.

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