Aw, give up, at least so far. Listening to Jacob Collier does precious little for my listening pleasure even if his outsize talent and multiple musical gifts are pretty obvious. Fair play to him. Talent, ideas, youthfulness, a zest for life and just as luckily for him the slick marketable multimedia primary colour sounds that the pop jazz singer-pianist has produced all combining and brings so intuitively to life.

Live he’s endearing, and impossible to dislike but hard to go nuts about and I can’t really buy into the hype that’s going around at the moment much as it is encouraging that hype about jazz can still happen at all! Collier may well be the biggest new name in jazz on YouTube at the moment, and from a marketing and publicity perspective the only Britjazzer to potentially break through on a global scale since Jamie Cullum.

Approaching musically his approximation to being a 21st century Bobby McFerrin heavily influenced by Stevie Wonder and an eclectic sampling of vocal jazz both vintage and more contemporary his more interesting work will surely arrive when he has long left the initial sunny delight of his own youthful optimism long behind. For now his achievements are not to be underestimated especially with a growing online audience. And Quincy Jones for one as his manager knows raw talent when he comes across it like few others. It might have taken a while given how long YouTube has been around but Collier might go down in history as the first Britjazz YouTube star, nearly 1.5m hits for instance for a Stevie Wonder cover that he posted a couple of years ago, and nearly 25,000 hits in two days for ‘Hajanga’ from the new album already. SG

Jacob Collier on ‘Saviour’ from his debut album In My Room, the title track a Beach Boys cover, just released is above