Isaiah Collier at Brosella: 'Pretending nothing is wrong is not an option'

With Isaiah Collier, Brosella Festival has managed to secure one of jazz's rising stars. Together with his backing band The Chosen Few, he will present The World Is On Fire. On the album, his virtuosity goes hand in and hand with activism.

Earlier this year, leading jazz magazine DownBeat proclaimed 27-year-old Isaiah Collier a “next sax giant” on its cover. For those familiar with his recent trajectory, this comes as no surprise. From his family, who had settled in Chicago from Mississippi, he inherited a love for blues, gospel, and jazz. He sang in the church choir and played piano, but it wasn't until he started playing saxophone at 11 that he knew where his future lay.

“It's like passing a shop window where you see an outfit you might like to try on, not quite knowing if it would suit you,” he tells us via Zoom from his hometown. “Turns out it suited me perfectly! I also played very loudly straight away, and was soon able to swap my alto saxophone for a tenor.” Collier impresses with his circular breathing technique, which he has mastered since the age of 14. “I see it as an extra muscle that you have to keep developing – if you don't use it, you lose it – and an additional way to express myself.”

The saxophonist and composer demonstrated that music is more than technique with The Story of 400 Years, an ambitious suite in which he focused on black America's centuries-long struggle. The title track of the recent The World Is On Fire was written during his student days on the American west coast. “I was confronted with wildfires for the first time and experienced climate change in practice. While I initially talked about a physical fire, it later became a metaphorical fire that flared up inside me against systemic oppression and racism. I was present during the protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Outraged by the brutal way the National Guard cracked down on civilians, complete with tear gas, batons, and rubber bullets, something broke inside me. This wasn't TV footage from 1965. It was happening right before my eyes in 2020. With all that random violence against black people, I couldn't afford to remain on the sidelines.”

His most recent album with backing band The Chosen Few thus became a sonic logbook that alternates jazz compositions with news reports and attempts to review the turbulent past five years.

“Often it seemed as if my colleagues didn't know how to handle all that destruction. After the pandemic, they simply returned to their art bubble. But artists must reflect on the state of the world. Pretending there isn't a genocide happening and that we aren't being indoctrinated with intolerance would only fuel ignorance. For my heroes too, pretending nothing was wrong was never an option. It shouldn't be for the current generation either. A journalist once asked Miles Davis if he would still make music if nobody knew who he was. He found that very presumptuous, because of course he wasn't just doing something random. For him, music was a conversation that had to be conducted and only truly became interesting when the audience began to take part in the discussion. Sometimes it can't be done by simply telling what's happening or showing images of it, and you have to puncture through your illusions with sound.”

Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few will perform on 6/7 at Brosella Festival, brosellafestival.be