Jacob Collier's genius is not the 200-track live loops or the Grammys — it is an ear that hears music between the twelve notes, and a voice that can sing what it hears, in tune, on demand. That is the answer Junewon Choi of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar gave when a viewer asked about Collier on a live stream, and it is why these online jazz guitar lessons keep returning to one refrain: the ear leads, the hands follow. Watching Collier work is a spectacular reminder of where music actually lives — and it is not in the fingers.
What did Jacob Collier actually do that was so remarkable?
Junewon watched Collier in a live session, back when Collier already had a Grammy or two. The surface spectacle was real: grabbing a triangle, sampling it into a mic, layering idea after idea until the session held some two hundred tracks, harmonizing his own melody in real time as the stack grew. Then came the moment that separated him from every other one-man-band act. He announced a good idea, slid the harmony between the piano keys — a microtonal modulation, adjusted through MIDI — and then sang the main melody at that in-between pitch, dead in tune, and harmonized it with more stacked vocals. Not just producing microtones with a machine: hearing them, and reproducing them with his own body.
What is microtonal music, in plain terms?
Western music divides the octave into twelve pitches, and virtually everything we play — jazz included — lives on that grid. Microtonal music uses the pitches between them: the notes in the cracks of the piano. Most trained musicians cannot even reliably hear those in-between pitches as destinations, let alone sing them. Collier composes with them fluently. That is why Junewon calls him a genius in the fullest sense: the theoretical understanding to know where those pitches sit, the ear to hear them as music, and the vocal control to make them real — all three at once.
Haven't we seen one-man geniuses before?
Yes — and the comparison sharpens what is new. Prince played and produced everything alone. Stevie Wonder did the same. Collier stands in that lineage, but at the far end of today's technology: MIDI, looping, and a bedroom that can be a full production studio. Junewon's point is that Collier is not a genius because of the technology — he carries the complete traditional musician's toolkit, the kind we have always called genius, and then uses the modern stack to let one person deploy all of it at once. The tools amplified the musician; they did not replace him.
What does any of this mean for a jazz guitarist?
You do not need microtones. You need the order of operations Collier makes vivid: hear first, then play. Junewon's teaching keeps circling this because guitarists are uniquely tempted to reverse it — the instrument rewards pattern-grabbing before the ear has voted. A weekend's worth of honest questions:
Can you sing the note you are about to play, before you play it?
When you learned your last phrase, did it come from a recording or from a shape?
Does your ear lead your hands, or do your hands drag your ear behind them?
If those questions sting a little, good — they point at the real practice. The entry point for training this way, with the ear in front from day one, is Building Blocks.
And if you want an honest measure of where your playing actually stands this weekend — ear included — take ten minutes with the Scorecard. For the companion idea that jazz's real revolution was never about adding notes, read Jazz's Real Revolution Was Rhythm, Not Notes, and for why none of this requires being "smart," see Do You Need to Be Smart to Learn Jazz Guitar? It Lives in Your Ear.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
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