Born in Cannes and raised in the nearby southeastern town of Antibes, Collin soaked up jazz at home listening to his mother’s Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald albums. But he was also widely exposed to jazz via the celebrated Jazz à Juan festival, which featured many of the music’s greatest improvisers. “My house was five minutes from the jazz festival, so I...
Born in Cannes and raised in the nearby southeastern town of Antibes, Collin soaked up jazz at home listening to his mother’s Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald albums. But he was also widely exposed to jazz via the celebrated Jazz à Juan festival, which featured many of the music’s greatest improvisers.
“My house was five minutes from the jazz festival, so I got to see a lot of that growing up,” Collin says. “I was studying classical music. As a young kid, I was always curious about jazz and improvised music.”
He performed with a pop and rock band in high school, but with no jazz program and few peers interested in jazz, he had no one to explore the music with in person. When the time came to start college at 17, Collin honored his parents’ wishes and enrolled in an international management program in the UK. But his love of music won out. “I always felt a need to listen constantly every day, and play whenever I could,” Collin says. Upon discovering new practice rooms with good pianos “I was playing six to eight hours a day, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
It might sound like a formula for flunking out, but class attendance was optional as long as Collin kept up with assignments and tested well (which he did with some intensive cramming). He made enough progress at the piano to earn a full scholarship to Berklee, relocating to Boston in 2001. While he studied performance with masters like Dave Liebman and Joe Lovano, Collin majored in Music Synthesis, learning about sound design and synthesizer programming.
“I didn’t want to be a jazz or performance major, I knew I’d be shedding eight hours a day anyway. I did the same thing in business school, kind of going to classes, doing okay, but mostly doing my own thing. I was never a tech geek, just wanted to get whatever information I needed.”
He quickly put his skills to use, co-producing the critically acclaimed album Moving by Hiromi’s Sonic Bloom bassist Tony Grey (one track, “White Woods,” appeared on a Weather Report tribute album). Graduating in three years, Collin moved to New York City, but he almost immediately got the call to audition for the Monk Program. Selected by a panel including Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and Wayne Shorter, he moved to Los Angeles for the two-year program, joining a prodigious cast of peers.
“Terence tried to have us compose as much as we could,” Collin says. “He really stressed the importance of having a sense of focus, a theme that’s always present through a piece.”
His heralded debut album The Rise and Fall of Pipokuhn featured bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Zach Harmon, fellow Monk Institute alumni. Since moving back to New York City in 2009, he’s gained recognition as a singular artist, “a visionary composer, an extraordinary jazz pianist and a very bright young rising star in the jazz world,” in the words of Jon Weber, the host of NPR’s PianoJazz.
