Jacob Collier discusses the improvisational nature of his performances and how he incorporates unexpected elements like audience reactions and environmental sounds into his music.
And every – every night where we got a fresh round of feedback, and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t really matter what the audience says to you after the show. You know, they might say, “Oh, that was a great show, we loved it.” Or “It was rubbish.” You know but you tend to sense, just even standing on the stage and being you on stage how that is going down, and so I think, it was a real kind of quick learning process of people immediately responded to the moments where I wasn’t impossibly perfect at something, you know, impossibly good at something, the moments where there would be space for me to be – you know, wiggle around, or something would go wrong. I can think of gigs where, you know, someone would cough, and it would loop, every time, it would loop, as part of the loop [coughing] – you know, in the percussion loop because it was really quiet and someone would yell or scream or a plane would go overhead, or whatever. That would get, that would become part of the groove of the song. And that’s a fabulous challenge, musically, how do you make that make sense, but you have to be willing to look a little bit like a fool, and just sort of embrace it, and I think for me one thing I’ve learned really is how special it can be when everyone is kind of doing that together, you know, the audience and performer alike are both coping with the strange curveball, and alchemizing it into something that feels really, really great, you know?