chorus, the sturdiest groove Collier has concocted. There is a psychedelic prechorus and a buoyant R.&B.

There is pop-soul crooning and weird vocal harmonies that swoop across the stereo spectrum. There are electronic bleats and snatches of funk guitar. But like all his songs, it is also about music itself, a formal exercise that tests how many sounds and ideas one pop recording can bear. It is, seemingly, a song about a breakup: вЂњNow the time has come for me to admit/I donвЂ™t think I could be your line of best fit,вЂќ Collier sings, a lyric that doesnвЂ™t quite trip off the tongue. The most striking attempt is вЂњSleeping on My Dreams,вЂќ which Collier has called his favorite track on the album. 3вЂќ - CollierвЂ™s most pop-facing record, in which he strives to marry the heady stuff of those master classes with the kind of R.&B. Four albums have followed, including the current Grammy nominee, вЂњDjesse Vol. The video caught the attention of Quincy Jones, who signed the teenager to a management deal. (He studied in prestigious conservatories and was raised in a musical household.) But what really stood out was the songвЂ™s harmonic intricacy: a multi-tracked chorale of Colliers, swerving through jazzy extensions and gnarly near-dissonances that resolved in surprising ways. One was a cover of Stevie WonderвЂ™s вЂњDonвЂ™t You Worry вЂ™Bout a Thing,вЂќ featuring Collier on keyboards, guitar, bouzouki, double bass and percussion. Collier is a star who has toured the world and won four Grammys - he is nominated for three more in 2021, including Album of the Year - yet he is most in his element when he faces a lecture-hall audience or a laptop camera and plumbs the deeps of music theory, holding forth on plagal cadences, time signatures in Bulgarian folk music and his own esoteric innovations, such as the continually modulating musical scale he has named the Super-Ultra-Hyper-Mega-Meta-Lydian.Д¬ollier is 26, but with his baby face and string-bean limbs, he looks little different than he did nearly a decade ago, when videos showcasing his virtuosity first circulated online. There are clips of him explicating the harmonic structure of Stevie WonderвЂ™s вЂњSir Duke.вЂќ There are the Logic Breakdown Sessions, in which he examines his own music at the molecular level, walking step by step through the construction of his songs. There are videos of him conducting master classes at the Berklee College of Music and the University of Southern California.

On the internet, you can find dozens of examples of Collier in professorial mode, or as professorial as it gets for a guy whose wardrobe leans to rainbow-colored Crocs and hats with ears.

To begin wrapping your mind around Jacob Collier, the wizardly English singer-songwriter-arranger-producer, the place to start is not a recording or a music video or a concert.

Freddie gibbs madlib tour