Isaiah Collier: The Day Traffic Took His Band, He Played Every Instrument Himself

Deviation’s “In 3” is a simple format: Benji B plays the artist’s own track, then hands them three picks. On October 7, Isaiah Collier used all three of his on John Coltrane. That tells you exactly where he lives.

The track Benji played was “Landscape of Dreams,” and the story behind it is the reason it is the best thing on his new EP. Collier had a sketch and a band booked. The band got stuck in traffic. So one of Chicago’s most decorated young jazz musicians did the only thing the day allowed: he recorded every instrument on the track himself. Flutes, drums, Mellotron, Wurlitzer, piano and percussion, all Collier, all in the room where the sketch was supposed to become a session. It was a first for him. By his own account, it was a “leap of faith.”

There is a particular kind of record that only comes out of a plan falling apart. “Landscape of Dreams” is not a demo that got promoted past its station, and it is not a stunt. It is a musician with a sketch and a deadline discovering that the players he was waiting on were, for once, himself. The instrument list is the giveaway. Flutes and Mellotron and Wurlitzer are not the sound of someone filling time while the band is late. They are the sound of someone who hears the whole arrangement in his head and, given a traffic jam, decides to find out whether his hands can do what his ears already can. The answer, on the evidence of the track, is yes.

The record it sits on makes the point twice over. *JOY*, released July 31, 2026 on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings, is five tracks, and its title track runs an 11-piece ensemble with horns and strings. That is the other end of Collier’s range, and it is worth holding the two tracks next to each other. One is eleven musicians in a room. The other is one musician in a room, playing six instruments because the room was empty. The same record holds both, and the one that came out of a traffic jam is the one Benji B chose to play on national radio. A record that can hold an 11-piece ensemble and a one-man session without either sounding like a compromise is a record with real range in it.

That range is not an accident of this EP. Collier was born in Chicago in 1998, and he leads The Chosen Few, whose *The World Is On Fire* came out in 2024. He is also a serious composer, in the long-form sense of the word: his 13-movement suite *The Story of 400 Years* premiered at the DuSable Black History Museum in December 2024. That is the credential that makes “Landscape of Dreams” more than a good story. A composer who writes in thirteen movements knows how parts fit together, how a line hands off to another line, how a piece earns its length. When the band did not show, he did not just play louder. He wrote, arranged and performed his way around the absence, and the track carries the discipline of that longer work in it.

Then there are the three picks. A guest on “In 3” gets three choices, room to show range. Collier used all three on John Coltrane. That is not range. That is a statement. It says the teacher is singular, the lineage is direct, and the ambition is to be measured against the largest figure in the music rather than the most fashionable one. It also explains the suite, and the ensemble writing, and the patience of a track that grows instead of rushing. Coltrane is the musician you pick when you are thinking in decades and in movements, not in singles. Three picks, one name, no hedging.

That is what makes him such a natural Antidote subject. The magazine has always been interested in the working musician rather than the poster, in the rooms where records actually get made and in the decisions that get made inside them. A traffic jam is not a press release. It is the kind of ordinary disaster that every working band knows, and what a musician does with it tells you more than any biography. Collier answered it by playing everything himself, and the result is the best thing on his new EP. The record did not need them to.

For a Tuesday, there is something fitting about starting here: not with a legacy act and not with a nostalgia play, but with a young bandleader from Chicago whose newest record holds an 11-piece ensemble and a one-man session side by side, and whose idea of three free choices on national radio was to name the same giant three times. Listen to “Landscape of Dreams” first. Then listen to the title track, and hear how much room one musician can fill.