LOS ANGELES, CALIF.- Shortly into a Monday morning piano lesson, Michael Uzowuru came alive. Seated at a black grand piano in a long, sunlit room, he warmed up with finger exercises and scales before his instructor, Riko Weimer, asked him to improvise a composition using diminished chords as a foundation. Closing his eyes, he kneaded his way into a languid, contemplative melody, his head bent gently over the keys.

“I generally have a lesson plan,” Weimer said when Uzowuru stopped, “but then he digests it in one try.”

Uzowuru, 32, sipped from a porcelain cup of espresso, rolled the sleeves of his bright pink sweater to his elbows and resumed playing. Four mornings a week, he drives 20 minutes from the Los Angeles home he shares with his girlfriend and son to Weimer’s Atwater Village studio. When he isn’t intensely working on his craft — “It almost hurts, the distance I feel between where I am and where I want to be,” he later lamented — he is helping some of the most influential figures in pop music spark their own imaginations.

Uzowuru may not have the name recognition of Jack Antonoff or Rick Rubin, but his work with artists including Beyoncé, FKA twigs, Frank Ocean, Halsey, Rosalía and SZA has solidified him as a collaborator that A-list artists seek out to sharpen and elevate their craft. His reputation for concocting elegant, distinctive pop songs — like Ocean’s “Nights,” or twigs’s “Cellophane” — has made him one of contemporary music’s most respected producers, even as he remains absent from the public eye.

On Friday, his latest high-profile collaboration — “Bando Stone & the New World,” the sixth album from Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino — arrived, 17 songs filled with dramatic rock, clever rap and silky R&B that were driven by a concept for a film: an artist recording his masterwork on a remote island as civilization collapses around him.

“For a while I thought he was some sort of shady character,” Glover said in a phone interview, with a laugh. “He works with Frank and that whole camp, and they’re very mysterious. I was intimidated.”

Uzowuru generally rejects labels like “mysterious” and “reclusive” despite being described as such for much of his career. “I can’t control other peoples’ perceptions of me,” he said in an interview at his North Hollywood studio, where he was surrounded by synthesizers and keyboards. But he conceded that he is shy and not fully comfortable with the idea of being a public figure. He’s been sitting on an unreleased solo album (an ambient record he occasionally sends to friends), but he doesn’t want to “sell it or advertise it as me.” He prefers to operate behind the curtains, allowing his catalog to speak for itself.

Uzowuru views producing as a “very, very sacred” act of trust, where a spiritual kinship is forged with an artist by arriving at an “essential truth.” Like Antonoff, who aims for an experience akin to therapy with the musicians he produces, Uzowuru believes relationships are the most crucial element of creative collaboration.

“The easiest way to work with special people is to do what you can to make them special,” he said. “The greater they are, the greater I am.”

Uzowuru has let relationships lead the way since 2009, when a chance encounter with Odd Future founder Tyler, the Creator at the Supreme store on Fairfax Avenue, led him to a gathering at the house of singer and producer Syd. There, a 17-year-old Uzowuru met a troupe of soon-to-be stars: Earl Sweatshirt, Frank Ocean, Vince Staples. He had only recently begun making beats — a friend familiar with his love of Kanye West gave him a download of FL Studio — but he immediately fit in with Tyler and his nonconformist crew. As one of the few Black kids and Nigerians at his high school, Uzowuru connected with Odd Future’s outsider spirit.

“I would completely not have a career if it wasn’t for Tyler,” Uzowuru said. “We were never best friends, maybe never even friends, but this guy, for whatever reason, decided to be kind to me because he had so much to give. He’s a solar system.”

Uzowuru went on to produce the opening song on Earl’s debut album, “Doris,” and made a joint mixtape with Staples, “Winter in Prague” (Uzowuru remembered the project as “super avant-garde,” Staples as “terrible”); they most recently worked together on Staples’s latest album, “Dark Times.”

It doesn’t surprise Staples that the quiet kid he met in Syd’s kitchen has since produced for some of the most high-profile artists on the planet. “Michael’s just a good person,” Staples said. “It’s how good of a heart he has that’s got him in these rooms. People just want to be around him.”

Ocean, another soft-spoken outsider, passed through Syd’s house that day. Uzowuru would go on to contribute to his acclaimed 2016 LP “Blonde,” and lend a hand to his visual album, “Endless.” In the following years, the two teamed up on the understated hit “Chanel” and the plucky, anxious “In My Room.” More recently, they’ve been working on new music together in Miami.

“Me and Michael’s careers exist post hip-hop — that genre, that culture, informs both of us greatly,” Ocean said in a phone interview. “But his appetite has grown; his vocabulary, musically, has grown so much over the time that I’ve known him.”

Ocean said when he’s had writer’s block (“knock on wood, once”), he talked to Uzowuru and Rubin: “Michael is a friend I talk to about where I’m at artistically very often.” And when he was first formulating “Nights,” the multipart centerpiece of “Blonde,” he rang Uzowuru for advice. “I had all these ways of describing what the album was missing,” he said. “Ultimately, I had to write it, I had to do it. But it did start in conversation with him.”

Aside from a handful of collaborations, Uzowuru and Ocean don’t often make music together. Their relationship, they agreed, goes far deeper than studio time. “I couldn’t love him or care about him more,” Uzowuru said. “I’m very grateful for him as a person outside of the work, so it doesn’t matter if we work. I don’t need to work with him, because it’s so much bigger. He’s separate from everyone else. He’s family.”

It’s not uncommon for Uzowuru to speak so reverently about his collaborators. He called SZA “one of one,” and gushed, “People don’t possess the ability to emote like she does.” (SZA confirmed the feeling is mutual. “I know that he’s an omen, a sign I’m doing something different, special and necessary,” she said in an interview. “We have genuine trust beyond a taste level.”) Chatting about Rosalía, the Spanish superstar who solicited Uzowuru to produce for her third album, “Motomami,” he spoke about the privilege “to be seen” by an artist of her caliber.

Born to Nigerian parents, Uzowuru grew up in Orange County with his sister and mother, who fled an abusive marriage when Uzowuru was 3 months old and put herself through nursing school. He remains intensely close to the woman who “always saw and affirmed me” and “accounted for my idiosyncrasies,” he said.

As a preteen and into high school, Uzowuru devoured the discographies of Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, Outkast and A Tribe Called Quest, skateboarded by himself after school and pored over Allen Iverson highlights and street-ball mixtapes. But being a Nigerian American in a school of mostly white kids and impatient teachers who mistook his silence for stupidity made him feel socially adrift, and he said he never received higher than a C in his academic career.

“I never had a choice but to be different,” he said, folding his hands in his lap. “It became almost like a muscle to do things early, to be in on something special and usher that into whatever space I was in.”

Uzowuru exudes an easy, quiet confidence. He’s tall and lanky, his movements deliberate and gentle, his manner watchful and intelligent; he makes firm eye contact and takes long, pregnant pauses when speaking. Still, he has a purposeful, exacting nature and pushes his collaborators to deliver in the studio.

This confidence helped when he began navigating the music industry in his early 20s. In 2014, off the strength of his work with Earl, Staples and Vic Mensa, Roc Nation offered him a $70,000 publishing deal, a life-changing amount of money at the time. He turned down the offer with the conviction that he could do better, and the bet paid off: He later signed with Universal Music Group and is particularly close with the company’s chief executive, Jody Gerson, who saw him — “a young, Black, damn-near boy at the time” — as a composer and prodigy “before anyone other than Frank” did, Uzowuru said.

Uzowuru doesn’t have a narrow aesthetic or an easily recognizable sound. He’s made guitar-backed ballads with Troye Sivan, campfire singalongs with Burna Boy and triumphant electro-pop with Anderson .Paak. He’s as capable of making a fizzy trap beat as a slow-burning folk number, an ambient string arrangement or a sugar-rush pop anthem.

“A long time ago, I decided that my style was going to be some form of assimilating,” he said, “filling in whatever cracks needed to be filled in.”

In 2019, Uzowuru got the chance to score his first film, Glover’s animated short “Guava Island.” Glover liked what he heard — humid, rangy music that moved from ambient to rhythmically complex with elastic ease. He asked Uzowuru to score “Swarm,” a miniseries that debuted last March on Amazon. As a distant admirer of Uzowuru’s collaborations with Ocean, Glover was impressed, but it wasn’t until they began working together that he realized just how special his new creative partner was.

“He’s a 1 percenter,” Glover said. “He’s not afraid to be himself.”

Before recording “Bando Stone & the New World,” Glover invited Uzowuru to his studio to pitch him on the “very big idea” driving the album. “I had pictures and I acted it out,” Glover said. “I told him, ‘This is the concept: I want this to be ‘Thriller.’ And Michael was like, ‘Bet.’”

Over the course of making the record, Glover and Uzowuru have discovered more similarities in their approaches. Glover called them “both Bauhaus people: We believe in functionality. Even if it’s to disrupt or disregard or reject.”

Glover added: “That’s what all this is about at the end of the day — ideas. It’s just being able to clearly and precisely be like, ‘This is a cool idea,’ and then have both of us argue and laugh or joke about it.”

Beyond their musical connection, Uzowuru and Glover have become good friends, bonding over art and fatherhood and, most urgently, how to lead a fulfilling life.

“I’ve learned a lot from Donald on how to be a person, on how to be a man,” Uzowuru said. “It’s the same way I feel about Frank. You just watch these guys and take mental notes.”

Over the past few months, Uzowuru has worked with other high-profile pop stars, but he loves saying no to people just as much as he says yes. He wants his collaborators to push him as much he pushes them, for everyone involved on a record to reach heights they’ve never reached before.

“I want to get better, I want to emote more,” he said. “I know that this is not it. There’s so much more.” He paused, gazing over at the twinkling Christmas lights in the live studio room behind him. “I’m very excited to learn my limitations. I’m excited to learn how high I can jump.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.