What do Jamie Cullum and Jacob Collier do different in a live setting compared to their studio recordings?
This question can be the foundation of a whole different research. Therefore I will treat it more as a superficially investigated addition to my main research. Nonetheless this topic is still important for me since I am a performing musician and I desire to play my compositions in live settings as well and I want it to be as colorful as possible but there may be some restrictions. This part of my research should rather function as a guideline or direction to follow in the process of building a live program based on my studio productions.
To investigate their live setting I chose the following recordings which are available on Youtube:
Jamie Cullum at North Sea Jazz 2024:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IrhYoZ93n0
Jacob Collier Live in Lisbon 2022:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8_DpBqenI&list=RDuw8_DpBqenI&start_radio=1
Jamie Cullum plays with the following musicians:
Jamie Cullum – vocals, piano
Marc Henderson – backing vocals
Aisha Stuart – backing vocals
Tom Richards – saxophone, keys, percussion, clarinet
Roy Simmons – trumpet, guitar
Tom Varral – guitar
Loz Garratt – bass
Fabio De Oliveria – drums
He has a common backline consisting of drums, bass and guitar complementing his own singing and piano playing. A guitarist helps to have harmonic support even in situations when he is not playing the piano himself.
In addition to that Tom Richards and Roy Simmons are multi instrumentalists which helps by giving him the flexibility to choose from a variety of instruments at all times. Both have a harmonic and a solo wind instrument respectively a percussion instrument to use ind different combinations when needed.
To cover the vocal aspect he has two fixed backing singers with high pitched voices as a foundation for his vocal arrangements which also have an important role on stage dancing and showing active presence as a show element. Additionally divers band members can also support singing backings which enables him to play even the choir parts from his vocal productions in a live context.
In order to have maximum freedom whilst performing and a big pallet sound-wise he uses a rather large eight peace band including multi instrumentalists.
Jacob Collier plays with the following musicians:
Alita Moses – Vocals & Percussion
Emily Elbert – Vocals & Guitar
Bryn Bliska – Keyboards & Vocals
Christian Euman – Drums & Vocals
Robin Mullarkey – Bass, Synth, Fender VI
Jacob also plays with a backline consisting of drums, bass and guitar. Additionally he has a keyboard player whilst all of them sing backing vocals except for Robin Mullarkey who instead also plays synth and guitar.
Most of his sounds which are not included in his backline are solved by keyboard patches.
His ensemble is with a total of six players smaller than Jamie Cullum’s band but a striking difference is that Jacob plays many different instruments live himself including piano, vocals, keyboards, percussion, bass, upright bass and guitar which allows him to achieve a lot of variety in sounds with a rather „static“ band with fixed roles.
It is conspicuous that every band member has at least two dedicated instruments mostly including backing vocals. That enables him to sing even difficult five-part harmony parts live. For everything else he has technical solutions for example when he wants to apply the concept of own voice stacks as described in my research or the amount of backing voices is not sufficient he plays his unique harmonizer build for him by Ben Bloomberg.
Conclusion Live-Context
Both Jacob Collier and Jamie Cullum have large bands with at least 6 musicians.
Both have at least three dedicated singer in total as a fundament for more complex or bigger vocal harmonies but in both cases almost the whole band is able to provide good sounding backing vocals.
Also both have multi instrumentalists as part of their band.
It seems that to implement the sounds of their impressive studio production in a live setting a certain men power and instrumental flexibility is key. Also the amount of singers should be very high.
Reflection of my own live-setting
Until lately I used to only play in a trio situation with bass and drums and no multi instrumentalists or singers which made my compositions sound rather empty when performing live.
Only since my master graduation concert I expanded my band to consist of me playing piano and singing, a bassist playing electric and double bass, a drummer, a backing singer also playing percussion and an additional keyboard player also singing backings. This expansion made it possible to incorporate important parts of my studio productions into my live program such as synthesizer or organ sounds. Being able to have more vocal layers and instruments that can fill gaps and interact with me brings the whole program to life.
Still this kind of line up feels like the absolute minimum. I think the overall sound could benefit from having more singers, some wind instruments and another harmonic instrument like guitar which would give me the freedom to not always having to sit at the piano in order to have an appropriately thick sound in certain situations. Also trying to incorporate other instruments into my playing could bring a possible expansion for my band sound but all these aspects will be part of trying different lineups, evaluating and learning from it in the future. For now I have a clear direction and a guide which possibilities there are when trying to recreate the multilayered and thick sound of studio productions in the real world with real musicians.