Jacob Collier and the joy of being a nerd

It’s April and I’m at the Trident Bookstore, surely one of the few places in the world where you can eat a full plate of breakfast, buy a book, and enjoy both while sitting between a group of middle schoolers doing homework and a group of people in their twenties – probably a band with their instruments scattered on the floor – talking loudly about MF DOOM. It’s a wonderfully nerdy morning. I love it here.

I had taken the bus from New York to Boston that morning to see Jacob Collier, who makes exceptionally nerdy music for a living. The viral videos that launched his career showcase his talent for complex vocal arrangements, playing every instrument imaginable, and using music theory concepts that would require a Berklee degree to explain. The DOOM disciples at Trident are almost certainly listening to Collier, too.

Collier makes daring music that isn’t always intuitive. It’d be hard to find something to put on at a party from his latest album, “Djesse Vol. 4.” The album jumps between genres that would be hard for most listeners to collide, often in the same song. Jumping from classical to metal to reggaeton to raga, Collier, 29, sounds like a kid still discovering every toy available to him.

No experiment is off limits, no contrast is taboo. On previous records, Collier’s songs have boldly asked the question: “What if ‘Moon River’ had several hundred vocal parts?” or “What if we found a key between A major and B major and put a chorus from Ty Dolla songs on top of it?” Collier makes music for people who ask themselves these questions and want to hear their answers.

Or, to put it simply: huge nerds.

I am one of them, of course. I live in New York, the most obligatory of obligatory stops for touring artists of Collier’s status, but when I saw tickets for Radio City Music Hall, I passed them up. Instead, I did what I did for Collier’s last tour – I texted my friend Alec, who led my a cappella group in college and now lives in Brookline. And I booked a bus north to see Collier at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, with people who feel like my own.

The first thing Collier does at a live show is conduct. The audience chorus – an impromptu exercise in which Collier signals different sections of the audience to sing specific notes and syllables – is a big reason I came. Videos of Collier’s audiences in various cities – Rome, Toronto and Singapore, for example – have gone viral for showing the wonder of a crowd of strangers coming together and singing in seemingly perfect harmony, as if thousands of them had all met and rehearsed beforehand..

The theory goes that Collier can do this because his audience is full of singers or musicians who have better hearing than the average fan. I think there’s a grain of truth to that, but it misses a bigger story. The notes and harmonies Collier conducts are fairly simple and most people can follow them, no matter how well trained they are. Bobby McFerrin, who conducted audience choirs long before Collier, demonstrated this at the 2008 World Science Festival when he turned a crowd full of neuroscientists into a choir.

In the Collier Choir, you don’t have to be a musician. You could be a neuroscientist or a barista or none of the above. You don’t have to know much, you just have to know what sounds good to you., and being brave enough to try, despite the risk of messing it up or sounding cheesy, and then trying again until you find something worth sticking with. And then keep trying.

In other words, be a nerd. And there are plenty of them at the Jacob Collier concert in Boston. In the front row, I’m talking to a psychiatrist who met her husband in a band in medical school. There’s an aerospace student at Northeastern who plays the bari saxophone. They sing loudly, laugh loudly, and exchange looks that say: How did he do that? I imagine each of them chatting in my ear about something I know nothing about, the excitement that comes from a life guided by curiosity. It’s the same simple excitement that Collier brings to music.

I’m not saying Collier’s music is easy to understand. If anyone wants to explain the super-ultra-hyper-mega-meta-Lydian scale to me, my inbox is open. But there’s a simple mindset behind it – ideas are infinite and we are not infinite, so why not explore as many as we can while we’re here?

There are things Collier does that I don’t like, like the screamo drop that brings “100,000 Voices” to a crashing end, or the Coldplay-meets-K-pop explosion of “Over You.” But I’m supremely glad he’s trying to make these kinds of things work. Someone less curious wouldn’t have discovered the sublime dance between keys in the pre-chorus of “Little Blue” or the relentlessly detailed arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” We should all be so fearless, delve so deeply into our passions, and try anything.

Towards the end of the show, Collier tells the audience that he doesn’t know what’s going to happen for the rest of the evening. But it’s good not to know, he says. That’s no small claim for Collier – knowing things is kind of his thing, and he’s in a room full of people who also know a lot. But being a nerd isn’t so much about knowing things as it is about being excited about the possibilities behind the things you don’t know.

In a concert hall in Boston, I’m in a room full of people who understand that. It’s their shared sense of wonder that I came here for. And when I walk through the doors and step onto Fenway, that’s what I hope to take with me.

The next time I feel no curiosity left, when life has tricked me into resigning myself to its walls of impossibility, I will think of that screaming, laughing room in Boston and the boyish 29-year-old on the stage saying: Come and sing with us.

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