Entertainment
Jacob Collier on whom he'd prefer to lose to at the Grammy Awards
In a category dominated by the likes of Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, Jacob Collier is unquestionably the least famous musician nominated for album of the year at Sunday’s 67th Grammy Awards. Yet the English singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist is actually a familiar contender for the Grammys’ flagship prize: His dark-horse nod for “Djesse Vol. 4” follows an earlier album of the year nomination for 2020’s “Djesse Vol. 3,” which vied against LPs by Post Malone, Dua Lipa and Coldplay at the 63rd Grammys. (Taylor Swift ended up winning that year with “Folklore.”)
Featuring appearances by a wide variety of guests — among them Brandi Carlile, Michael McDonald, Anoushka Shankar, Shawn Mendes, Kirk Franklin and John Mayer — the sprawling yet intricately detailed “Djesse Vol. 4” layers electronics and hand-played instruments as it blends R&B, jazz, folk and even a bit of death metal; the album’s opener, “100,000 Voices,” features recordings of about that many audience members at Collier’s concerts, where he conducts the crowd like a giant choir.
In addition to album of the year, Collier, 30, is up for two more Grammys at Sunday’s show: global music performance for “A Rock Somewhere” and arrangement, for a rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” featuring John Legend and Tori Kelly. Collier discussed the album and his relationships with Joni Mitchell and the late Quincy Jones on a recent afternoon in Los Angeles.
You’ve said that “Djesse Vol. 4” is the last installment in a four-album series. Did you always know it would be the finale?
I did, actually. I finished “In My Room,” which is the first album I made, as a completely solitary mission — recorded, mixed, everything by myself. So after that I was craving collaboration. I wanted to make, in a sense, four different rooms, each dictated by a different sonic environment. The first was like an orchestral record — very big and broad and sort of explosive. Vol. 2 was more folky and singer-songwriter-y, with a smaller acoustic space than the first one. Vol. 3, which was the quarantine album, was almost no space at all. It was what happens in the dark, weird star field of your brain when you just collide stuff together.
And Vol. 4?
For a long time I didn’t know what it was gonna be about. But touring Vol. 3, the thing I fell in love with was the audience. What I recognized in my fascination is that it felt the same to the earliest days, except that now the voice I was more interested in was the voice en masse rather than my own.
Among the nominees for album of the year, yours would seem to share the most with “New Blue Sun,” André 3000’s experimental jazz LP. But he’s talked about the value of a beginner’s mind in his journey as a flute player, whereas I don’t hear much naivete in your music.
I think part of the nature of a fourth album of four is that it’s going to be a bit of an opus to what I’ve learned in the last 10 years of making music. It’s different from “In My Room,” which was very much about naivete: I’ve never done this before. What happens when you make an album? Let’s find out. But this one isn’t a naïve record. I wouldn’t say it’s coming out of the blue.
Have you heard André’s album?
Yeah. I think the value of that record, in a funny way, isn’t a musical value. And I’d imagine he’d be OK with that. The songs all have these 10-word titles, like a diary entry. I’m refreshed by how nonconformist the format of the record is. It doesn’t make me want to make music, but it makes me want to think differently about my life. I wonder how he’ll feel about the record in 20 years’ time. I’m curious what he’s learned from it. I’m also curious who voted for it. He’s such a beloved and well-known figure, but in terms of what the Grammys stand for, which is always a little bit hard to say, I wonder where he sits in that. I’m glad he’s in there, because it’s unlike any other album in the category. It’s very “f— you” in a sense. I love him for that.
I saw you play piano with Joni Mitchell at the Hollywood Bowl last year. How’d you become part of the Joni Jam?
I met Brandi Carlile in 2021 as she was in the process of rekindling Joni’s magic. Joni had been home alone — really, really fragile — and Brandi, who’s just this amazing human, had this vision of the Joni Jams, where people come to Joni’s house and we sing Joni songs. So I went to Joni’s house and was absolutely blown away to even be there. The wall with dulcimers from the ’70s, the paintings on the doorways — it was just unbelievable as a huge Joni fan. I did that and thought, Well, that was a one-off. I was imagining that Joni was kind of on the decline. But she’s gone from strength to strength. So then Brandi called me beginning of last year and said, “Look, Joni’s gonna sing at the Grammys — are you gonna be around?” We played “Both Sides Now” on the show, which then kind of became the Joni Jam at the Hollywood Bowl.
Some things about Joni’s musicianship have deteriorated: She doesn’t play much guitar anymore, and her voice is an octave lower than it was. But her phrasing is intact, and that’s when you know that she’s really a jazzer and that she’s hung out with Wayne Shorter. Every time you do a song, she’ll sing slightly early or slightly late or slightly elongated. And I think once she realized that I was also one of those people, we kind of had a bit of a click. It was really amazing to kind of grant each other that freedom, because a lot of people in that band were very religiously playing her parts. And if they hadn’t been in the band, it would’ve fallen apart. You can’t have just Jonis in the band, you know? I had the delight to be brought in to kind of decorate, to play around — to almost tease her up into the jousting arena. I’ll never forget it.
Jacob Collier in Los Angeles.
(Annie Noelker/For The Times)
The set list for the Bowl show was completely insane.
Insane! The first half was just us saying, “Joni, what do you want to do?” She was like, “I want to play the deepest cuts.” And then the second half was more of the well-known tunes. She’s at a point in her career where she could easily say, “I’m gonna put a bow on this, and you’re gonna love it.” But she’s still pushing.
Your mentor Quincy Jones died last year. Do you think anything died with him? Something he did or stood for that we won’t see again?
The biggest gift I received from him was watching how he treated people. You don’t create that kind of legacy without understanding how to reach people’s souls and hearts. I think we won’t see a person with that combination of talent, audacity and humanity. Obviously, it’s there in the music. But being with him in the world, people would come up and say, “Quincy, you’ve done this and this and this,” and he always had a way of disarming them — cutting off the stream of adulation and making it a human interaction.
You have a favorite song or album of his?
One of the first tunes I ever learned of Quincy’s is a song called “Razzamatazz,” from “The Dude.” Patti Austin sings it. It’s just a perfect piece of music — so funky and so fun.
“Just Once” is the one for me from “The Dude.” The thing that happens at the end —
Where it goes up a tone: [sings] “Find a way to stay together…” It’s unreal. The thing about Quincy is he understood the harmonic context of stuff like that because he’d done the arranging thing. The song could easily have stayed in C-major, but no — it must ascend. He was just the coolest.
What’s your stodgiest musical position?
I can be quite a stickler with tuning. I’ve explored microtonality, so on the one hand, it’s like everything’s in tune, right? But sometimes I’ll hear a brass sextet or a string quartet play a piece of classical music perfectly in tune with the piano, and I’m like, “That’s such a shame, because the piano itself is not in tune.”
Now that the “Djesse” project is complete, what will your next record be?
I don’t know yet. It’s the first time I’ve not known for seven years — that’s a thrill for me. A lot of the things I’ve built and made in the past have been big, “100,000 Voices” as the biggest example. Now that I’ve done that, I think my brain is craving smaller containers. What if I made a record just on piano or just on guitar?
If it can’t be you, who would you enjoy seeing win album of the year?
I think Beyoncé’s record is courageous, and I commend people for that. She could have not made that record, or she could have made something more straightforward. I think it was brazen, and I think it came from a place of really knowing what she wanted to say and really f—ing saying it. So I’d be pretty stoked to lose to Beyoncé.
Movie Reviews
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Entertainment
Universal Music invests $80 million in Bollywood production company
Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.
Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.
While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.
The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.
India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.
Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.
“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”
Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.
Movie Reviews
UNTIL DAWN Review
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot of UNTIL DAWN puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong humanist worldview that twists the concept of modern psychology into a supernatural hellscape with unexplained time loops and reoccurring nightmarish horror filled with excessive violence and gore, but with unexplained pagan supernatural elements (such as a storm circling a house, the appearance of more buildings, the time loop itself, and many more), the time loop perverts the laws of mortality and implies that the consequences of violence, murder, suicide, etc., don’t apply, the psychologist controlling the time loop discusses the situation with modern psychology in vague circles meant to confuse and disorient the nature of the reality in which the victims are trapped, religion or God is not explicitly discussed, but there’s an unexplained cross in front of a house that isn’t explained and a character references the belief that a possessed person cannot become possessed through contact but rather weakness of faith, and some occult content where one woman is a self-described psychic and is into “woo-woo” stuff as another character describes it, she tries to amplify her psychic abilities with help from the others by holding hands and meditation, and she often has strong feelings and seems to have a sense the others do not have, but no worship or symbols are shown, plus a girl dating a guy is said to have previously dated a girl as well as other men;
Foul Language:
At least 101 obscenities (including 62 “f” words), two strong profanities mentioning the name of Jesus, and four light profanities;
Violence:
Very severe violence and gratuitous blood and gore throughout including but not limited to dead bodies, monsters, scarred masked psychopath, stabbing, beating, and people spontaneously exploding;
Sex:
No sex shown, but a person puts on a VHS tape and a pornographic movie is heard playing briefly but not shown, and a woman is said to date a lot of people and one time dated another woman;
Nudity:
No nudity;
Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking or drugs; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
A psychologist is a callous antagonist whose motives are relatively unknown beyond having a morbid curiosity that led to awful experiments and playing games with other people, he purposely keeps people trapped for no known reason other than his sick and twisted observations that end in gruesome murder and unnecessary torture.
One year after her sister Melanie vanished without a trace, Clover and her friends look to find more information about her disappearance. Clues lead them to an abandoned mining town. This place of unimaginable horrors traps them all in a horrifying time loop where they will be murdered again and again.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances, but it has a strong humanist worldview overall with some occult elements is filled with gruesome violence, gore, lots of strong foul language, and a time loop that leads to an increasing amount of horrific murder and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
The movie begins with a woman named Melanie clawing her way through the dirt with an unknown monster chasing after her. Digging her way out, she looks up to a masked psychopath standing over her with a scythe. She begs him, “No! Please not again. I can’t!” He fatally stabs her without a thought. It cuts to the main title, and an hourglass is shown with a ticking clock sound and unsettling music.
Cut to a group pf people in a red car driving up a winding mountain, an obvious nod to THE SHINING. It’s been one year after Clover’s sister Melanie vanished without a trace. The group consists of Max, Nina, Megan, Abe, and Clover. Shortly after their mother died, Melanie had decided to start a new life in New York. Clover decided to stay, which created tension between the sisters before Melanie left.
Clover and her friends are looking for more information about her disappearance. Their last stop is the last place she was seen in a video message taken in front of a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Megan, a proclaimed psychic, wants to join hands outside and see if they can feel any mystical energy regarding Melanie. Their attempt is cut short when an RV blares its horn and almost hits them, scaring them all.
Clover goes inside the gas station for a cup of coffee while the others talk outside. Clover asks the man behind the register if he worked here last year. After confirming he’s been working there for years, she shows him a picture of Melanie from the video. He asks if she was missing and clarifies saying that Clover is not the first to come asking. When she asks if many people around here go missing, he says people “get in trouble” in Glore Valley. As their only lead, the group decides to go there and stick together.
Nervously driving to the valley in an increasingly dangerous storm, the group begins to question what they are doing. Suddenly the storm stops but is still raging behind them. They park in front of a house with a “Welcome Center” sign, with the storm circling around the area but leaving the house dry. Confused, they get out of the car and look around. Nina decides to see if there’s anyone inside so they can come up with a plan. Everyone goes in except Clover, who walks up to the strange rain wall.
Inside the house, they find a dated and dusty interior. The power and water don’t work, and they conclude that they are the first people to come there in years. There is a strange hourglass with a skull on the wall. Checking the guest book, Nina finds Melanie’s name signed multiple times, with increasingly shaky handwriting. In another room, Abe finds many missing posters with faces on a bulletin board and finds poster with Melanie’s face.
Outside, Clover thinks she sees a person in the rain. She also hears Melanie’s voice and runs after it. Concerned, Max calls after her and he pulls her back in. As Nina signs the guestbook, the sun suddenly sets and the clock starts ticking.
Inside the house now with the hourglass turned over, they try to understand what’s happening. The car is out in the rain now with someone revving the engine threateningly. Some of them go to the dark basement, where the lights don’t work. There is an eerie sense of dread as Abe goes to check out a noise, and Nina finds a scarred and masked psychopath standing in a room as the top half of Abe’s body falls to the ground.
Hearing the commotion upstairs, the others go to see what happened and Max spots the killer. They run to hide, and the apparently invincible psychopath horrifically stabs each of them as they try to fight back. The sand in the hourglass runs back, as each character returns to where they were when Nina originally signed the book (she now signs it a second time). They remember what had just taken place, and how they were all murdered. Clearly stuck in this time loop escape room situation, they will now have to figure out how to escape this terrifying hellscape as the situations get worse with every loop.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
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