Cologne Jazzweek: Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few

Isaiah Collier is quite young. Born in Chicago in 1998, he learned the piano as a young boy and also sang in the church choir. His older brother introduced him to the saxophone when he was 11 years old, and the greats of his hometown's jazz scene became his mentors - such as pianist Robert Irving III and saxophonist Ari Brown. After studying at the Brubeck Institute in California, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Angel Bat Dawid brought him into her band Brothahood - as a drummer and as a saxophonist. In 2021, Collier's second leader album "Cosmic Transitions" was released, which he recorded with his band The Chosen Few at the legendary Rudy van Gelder Studios on September 23, 2020, John Coltrane's 96th birthday. And indeed, the five-movement suite heard on this album is reminiscent of Coltrane's epochal 1965 work "A Love Supreme." It seems as if Collier on tenor and soprano saxophone and his Chosen Few have sought to transform Coltrane's mystical mastery into the here and now. Bells, singing bowls and the chanting of the musicians set the mood for the following 50 minutes, in which Collier and his band do their utmost, as young musicians of today, to set an intense and spiritual monument to classical jazz modernism à la Coltrane, in order to be able to root themselves deeply in the present.