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
Movie Review: A real-life ’70s hostage drama crackles in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.
In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. Kiritsis held a sawed-off shotgun to the back of Hall’s head and draped a wire around his neck that connected to the gun. If he moved too much, he would die.
The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis’ apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm.
But in “Dead Man’s Wire,” starring Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, these events are vividly brought to life by Van Sant. It’s been seven years since Van Sant directed, following 2018’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” and one of the prevailing takeaways of his new film is that that’s too long of a break for a filmmaker of Van Sant’s caliber.
Working from a script by Austin Kolodney, the filmmaker of “My Own Private Idaho” and “Good Will Hunting” turns “Dead Man’s Wire” into not a period-piece time capsule but a bracingly relevant drama of outrage and inequality. Tony feels aggrieved by his mortgage company over a land deal the bank, he claims, blocked. We’re never given many specifics, but at the same time, there’s little doubt in “Dead Man’s Wire” that Tony’s cause is just. His means might be desperate and abhorrent, but the movie is very definitely on his side.
That’s owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like “It,” “The Crow” and “Nosferatu,” here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very ’70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels “Dead Man’s Wire.”
Yet Van Sant’s film aspires to be a larger ensemble drama, which it only partially succeeds at. Tony’s plight is far from a solitary one, as numerous threads suggest in Kolodney’s fast-paced script. First and foremost is Colman Domingo as a local DJ named Fred Temple. (If ever there were an actor suited, with a smooth baritone, to play a ’70s radio DJ, it’s Domingo.) Tony, a fan, calls Fred to air his demands. But it’s not just a media outlet for him. Fred touts himself as “the voice of the people.”
Something similar could be said of Tony, who rapidly emerges as a kind of folk hero. As much as he tortures his hostage (a very good Dacre Montgomery), he’s kind to the police officers surrounding him. And as he and Dick spend more time together, Dick emerges as a kind of victim, himself. It’s his father’s bank, and when Tony gets M.L. Hall (Al Pacino) on the phone, he sounds painfully insensitive, sooner ready to sacrifice his son than acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Pacino’s presence in “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nod to “Dog Day Afternoon,” a movie that may be far better — but, then again, that’s true of most films in comparison to Sidney Lumet’s unsurpassed 1975 classic. Still, Van Sant’s film bears some of the same rage and disillusionment with the meatgrinder of capitalism as “Dog Day.”
There’s also a telling, if not entirely successful subplot of a local TV news reporter (Myha’la) struggling against stereotypes. Even when she gets the goods on the unspooling news story, the way her producer says to “chop it up” and put it on air makes it clear: Whatever Tony is rebelling against, it’s him, not his plight, that will be served up on a prime-time plate.
It doesn’t take recent similar cases of national fascination, such as Luigi Mangione, charged with killing a healthcare executive, to see contemporary echoes of Kiritsis’ tale. The real story is more complicated and less metaphor-ready, of course, than the movie, which detracts some from the film’s gritty sense of verisimilitude. Staying closer to the truth might have produced a more dynamic movie.
But “Dead Man’s Wire” still works. In the film, Tony’s demands are $5 million and an apology. It’s clear the latter means more to him than the money. The tragedy in “Dead Man’s Wire” is just how elusive “I’m sorry” can be.
“Dead Man’s Wire,” a Row K Entertainment release, is rated R for language throughout. Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.
In a bid for greater user engagement, Walt Disney Co. will introduce vertical videos to its Disney+ app over the next year, a company executive said Wednesday.
The move is part of the Burbank media and entertainment company’s effort to encourage more frequent app usage, particularly on smartphones.
“We know that mobile is an incredible opportunity to turn Disney+ into a true daily destination for fans,” Erin Teague, executive vice president of product management, said during an onstage presentation in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. “All of the short-form Disney content you want, all in one unified app.”
Teague said the company will evolve that capability over time to determine new formats, categories and content types.
Disney’s presentation also touched on its interest in artificial intelligence. Last month, San Francisco startup OpenAI said it had reached a licensing deal with Disney to use more than 200 of the company’s popular characters in its text-to-video tool, Sora. Under the terms of that deal, users will be able to write prompts that generate short videos featuring Disney characters and use ChatGPT images to create those characters’ visages. Some of those Sora-generated videos will be shown on Disney+, though the companies said the deal did not include talent likenesses or voices.
Disney also said it would invest $1 billion into the AI company.
Part of Disney’s move toward AI is to appeal to young Gen Alpha viewers, who are more comfortable with AI and “expect to interact with entertainment” instead of simply watching stories on the screen, Teague said.
“AI is an accelerator,” she said. “It’s why collaborations with partners like OpenAI are absolutely crucial. We want to empower a new generation of fandom that is more interactive and immersive, while also respecting human creativity and protecting user safety.”
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Is This Thing On?
Cinematic stories of disintegrating marriages are fairly commonplace—and often depressing emotional endurance tests, besides—so it’s interesting to see co-writer/director Bradley Cooper take this variation on the theme in a fresher direction. The unhappy couple in this place is Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), who decide matter-of-factly to separate. Then Alex impulsively decides to get up on stage at an open-mic comedy night, and starts turning their relationship issues into material. The premise would seem to suggest an uneven balance towards Alex’s perspective, but the script is just as interested in Tess—a former Olympic-level volleyball player who retired to focus on motherhood—searching for her own purpose. And the narrative takes a provocative twist when their individual sparks of renewed happiness lead them towards something resembling an affair with their own spouse. The screenplay faces a challenge common to movies about comedians in that Alex’s material, even once he’s supposed to be actively working on it, isn’t particularly good, and Cooper isn’t particularly restrained in his own supporting performance as the comic-relief buddy character (who is called “Balls,” if that provides any hints). Yet the two lead performances are terrific—particularly Dern, who nails complex facial expressions upon her first encounter with Alex’s act—as Cooper and company turn this narrative into an exploration of how it can seem that you’ve fallen out of love with your partner, when what you’ve really fallen out of love with is the rest of your life. Available Jan. 9 in theaters. (R)
JANUARY SPECIAL SCREENINGS
KRCL’s Music Meets Movies: Dig! XX @ Brewvies: As part of a farewell to Sundance, Brewvies/KRCL’s regular Music Meets Movies series presents the extended 20th anniversary edition of the 2004 Sundance documentary about the rivalry between the Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre as they chart different music-biz paths. The screening takes place at Brewvies (677 S. 200 West) on Jan. 8 @ 7:30 p.m., $10 at the door or 2-for-1 with KRCL shirt. brewvies.com
Trent Harris weekend @ SLFS: Utah’s own Trent Harris has charted a singular course as an independent filmmaker, and you can catch two of his most (in)famous works at Salt Lake Film Society. In 1991’s Rubin & Ed, two mismatched souls—one an eccentric, isolated young man (Crispin Glover), the other a middle-aged financial scammer—wind up on a comedic road trip through the Utah desert; 1995’s Plan 10 from Outer Space turns Mormon theology into a crazy science-fiction parody. Get a double dose of uncut Trent Harris weirdness on Friday, Jan. 9, with Rubin & Ed at 7 p.m. and Plan 10 from Outer Space at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13.75 for each screening. slfs.org
Rob Reiner retrospective @ Brewvies Sunday Brunch: Last month’s tragic passing of actor/director Rob Reiner reminded people of his extraordinary work, particularly his first handful of features. Brewvies’ regular “Sunday Brunch” series showcases three of these films this month with This Is Spinal Tap (Jan. 11), The Princess Bride (Jan. 18) and Stand By Me (Jan. 25). All screenings are free with no reservations, on a first-come first-served basis, at noon each day. brewvies.com
David Lynch retrospective @ SLFS: It’s been a year since the passing of groundbreaking artist David Lynch, and Salt Lake Film Society’s Broadway Centre Cinemas marks the occasion with some of his greatest filmed work. In addition to theatrical features Eraserhead (Jan. 11), Inland Empire (Jan. 11), Mulholland Dr. (Jan. 12), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Jan. 14), Blue Velvet (Jan. 19) and Lost Highway (Jan. 19), you can experience the entirety of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return on the big screen in two-episode blocs Jan. 16 – 18. The programming also includes the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. slfs.org
Death by Numbers @ Utah Film Center: Directed by Kim A. Snyder (the 2025 Sundance feature documentary The Librarians), this 2024 Oscar-nominated documentary short focuses on Sam Fuentes, survivor of a school shooting who attempts to process her experience through poetry. This special screening features a live Q&A with Terri Gilfillan and Nancy Farrar-Halden of Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, with Zoom participation by Sam Fuentes. The screening on Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 7 p.m. at Utah Film Center (375 W. 400 North) is free with registration at the website.
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