Jacob Collier
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and arranger known for genre-spanning music, inventive harmony and participatory live performances; a TED2026 speaker who explores melody, rhythm, harmony and “the wiggle.”
Harmony Changes a Note’s Emotional Meaning Without Changing Its Pitch
Musician Jacob Collier argues that music derives its expressive force from “the wiggle”: movement and changing relationships rather than fixed notes or technical precision. Using Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” he shows how melody gains meaning through contour, rhythm through phrasing and space, and harmony through the way an unchanged note can take on a different emotional color when its chord changes. For Collier, musical structure matters not because it stays rigid, but because it allows tension, difference and return to register.
MAS Vocal Gives “Bridge Over Troubled Water” a Collective Voice
Music maker Jacob Collier introduces MAS Vocal, a high-school choir conducted by Cindy Ellis, as a group whose singing can divide a listener’s life into a before and after. In Collier’s arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the choir gives collective force to the song’s promise of staying near, offering comfort and taking another person’s part in hardship.
Jacob Collier Builds “All You Need Is Love” Live With an Unrehearsed Orchestra
At TED2026 in Vancouver, Jacob Collier conducted the VSO School of Music Orchestra through an unrehearsed arrangement of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” built in front of the audience without sheet music or prior plan. The performance argues, by demonstration, that improvisation at orchestral scale depends less on vagueness than on precise, rapidly revised instructions: pitches, loops, dynamics, entrances and roles assigned in real time.