The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and educator Isaiah Collier. Collier’s second album of 2024, The World is On Fire, was released on 18 October.
Like its immediate predecessor, The Almighty, The World is On Fire features the Chosen Few: pianist Julian Davis Reid, bassist Jeremiah Hunt, and drummer Michael Ode. Links to purchase The World is On Fire, and to Collier’s website, can be found at the end of this article.
The world is on fire. So is Isaiah Collier.
His last album, the potent and enveloping The Almighty, featured the second-to-last hurrah of his Chosen Few ensemble (more on that later). On that record, the spiritual, fire-breathing, Trane-adjacent saxophonist grappled with notions and expressions of the divine.
Yet on The World is On Fire, he and his crew deal with immediate, terrestrial concerns regarding police brutality and civil rights, like the deaths of Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and more. As he lays out, such atrocities only galvanise him.
“The title itself is a nod to the vilest acts committed by those in power, the economic upheavals, and the relentless exfoliation of systemic racism,” Collier explains in the press release. “This work serves as a requiem for the countless lives lost and the injustices that remain unacknowledged.”
No matter your persuasion, Collier is a superlative saxophonist to know. Here’s an interview with him about his new album and much more.
UK Jazz News: A lot of press has foregrounded your relative youth as per this business, even though you’re in your mid-twenties. How do you react to that?
Isaiah Collier: I just react by simply saying, Miles Davis was 16 years old working with Billy Eckstine. He was 19, 20, already recording and working with Charlie Parker. So, it’s just part of the tradition, I guess. If you’re showing up to do the work, you’re showing up to do the work.
I was actually having this conversation with somebody earlier, because I’ve been hearing the word ‘genius’, but I’m also shying away from that word because it feels like it’s so overly used without context.
I have to ask myself, What does the word ‘genius’ really mean? And I think genius really means a person who figures out discipline the quickest. You can be any age, and whenever you decide to finally be serious or disciplined about something, is the moment you’ll yield results.
I mean, it’s the same concept [that applies to] everybody else. There are way younger people who have done more incredible things, but the consistency is where it differs.
UKJN: Who’s a genius in your eyes? I’ve got my list.
IC: [Singer/songwriter] Moses Sumney is a genius. I’ve been talking about him quite a bit in most of my interviews. But, yeah, that’s a genius.
And it’s not even on a technical level; it’s on a refinement level. That’s what genius is – just talent that’s refined. He’s been great for years, but dude – he gets tighter and tighter. The vocals were just angelic when you first heard him, but now, he’s dialling it in even deeper.
My man Surya Botofasina, the pianist who’s been working with André 3000 lately, is also a genius. He studied with Alice Coltrane at the ashram, and he’s one of the only few people that can – I’m not going to say emulate anything – but speak a specific vernacular of frequencies.
Alice Coltrane was classically trained. She grew up in Detroit, moved to New York, and wound up becoming the protégé of Bud Powell, who was the premier bebop pianist.
She married John Coltrane, had his kids, and still toured the world with him. Then, even after his passing, she continued to expand and transfer everything she was already working on to the heart.
She did orchestration and arrangements; she still meditated. She started a whole entire collective just to teach people the ways of the Vedic tradition up to the day she died. It didn’t feel like she ever peaked.
That’s genius, man – refining.
UKJN: Can you talk about the decision to disband the Chosen Few after this record?
IC: Everybody wants to ask that question.
I’m sorry: it’s a normal question. I mean, it’s just time. I could be like, “Well, there are other circumstances,” but other circumstances equal the same general answer at the end: it’s just time.
I’ve been working at this for eight years, and usually in numerology, eight speaks to the cycle of completion. So, whether I wanted it to be something else, or whatever I thought it was going to be – it ran its course.
UKJN: As I understand it, you seem to value volume and consistency of output over the typical rollout system. You don’t subscribe to these models foisted upon musicians.
IC: That’s the other thing too, right? It’s this reverse concept of supply and demand: demand, then supply. I like that saying, because it also goes in conjunction with the phrase “quality versus quantity,” and right now, we live in a day and age where both of those phrases have been split. I have a quantity of s—t, but if I have no quality, why am I presenting it?
Man, I’m focused on creating intentional sounds – frequencies and vibrations. And in that, I’m on the quest of trying to figure out what hasn’t been heard already in the past thousands of years of music. What does it take to make new music? We can sit down critics and have them talk about what they think it is, but nobody knows.
To be innovative is a very tricky tradition, because you also have to be based in tradition. So traditional, that you understand what is not the confines of tradition. And only through understanding what isn’t, do you start to actually get into creativity.
UKJN: How do you apply the construction of quantity versus quality to the often overcrowded and oversaturated jazz market?
IC: A lot of times, our favourite artists start off as roots artists. As they, and some of us, work up the ladder, some of us become trunks, which I value to be more than anything.
But then there are other artists who want to become branches. The problem with the branches is they always break – and when they break, they fall back to the ground. Just because they fall back to the ground does not mean they’re connecting back with the roots.
So, to be firmly planted like a tree – to be connected to the roots of the musical culture, but to remain a trunk – that means that you can still grow.
UKJN: Have you seen that transpire in your own creative life?
IC: For me, everything just keeps connecting to the next thing.
Personally, I see my records as stories. They’re books. As artists, most of our albums become like volumes. Volumes are all part of the same body of work, but they’re different explanations of certain components of it.
Nonetheless, in order for you to connect book to book, foreshadowing is needed. So, I like to believe that I’m telling people exactly what I’m about to do next.
UKJN: If albums are like books, as you say, how have you honed your storytelling ability on The World is On Fire?
IC: The other story [The Almighty] is a little bit more cinematic, but this one fully paints the scenery, especially because of the introduction to the news clips.
I don’t want people to have assumptions about why they think I wrote something. I try to speak as plain as I can, and say what I mean. Hopefully, this one removes any ambiguous or nebulous interpretation.
UKJN: You’re known as a tenor player. You’ve been playing the alto and soprano saxophones more.
IC: It’s fun for me, because [the alto] was the first one I started off on. So, I hadn’t really done a project on alto since my first album.
UKJN: Which alto players do you ride for?
IC: Most people wouldn’t even know his name, but Arthur Blythe. Check out his song, ‘Faceless Woman.’ Cannonball [Adderley]. Marion Brown. Sonny Stitt, particularly because he was one of those few cats who could actually, really roll on all the saxophones.
You find some people who have niches, but he was just a saxophonist – and that’s always how I viewed what I did. I never really subscribed to any of the [designations between] saxophones.
UKJN: What have you been working on? What’s on the immediate horizon?
IC: For the past six and a half years, I’ve been working on a 13-movement suite which retells the tale of the transatlantic slave trade all the way up until now.
It’s not just with this emphasis of, Oh god, this happened to Black people in America. It’s more that we present an accountable front for us to finally sit down and say, “OK, this is part of the American narrative.”
And why do we say this now? Because given the context of everything that’s going on in the world right now, when we have things that happen in history, and we like to pretend like they didn’t happen, we create certain mentalities within both the suspects and the victims.
They both start to flip roles when we don’t have the proper conversation, and the proper context of what actually has transpired. And only after that can we figure out: What do we want to aspire towards?
