Jon Batiste performs during the 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, in Indio, Calif.Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Jon Batiste approaches art with the head of an alchemist, the heart of an empath and the shoulders of Atlas.
One of the most acclaimed American composers of his generation, Batiste’s résumé – which includes contributing to the new Beyoncé album, the Oscar-winning score for Soul, the Grammy album of the year We Are, the orchestral film American Symphony, as well as his most recent album, World Music Radio – is steeped in a robust dialogue between this trio of forces, giving anything he touches an ingrained heft.
Born into a prodigious lineage of New Orleans musicians, Batiste came of age in the rhythms of jazz and blues. After attending Juilliard, he became a fixture on late-night television as the magnetic bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, before his career and a cancer diagnosis for his partner, the bestselling author Suleika Jaouad, made it impossible to continue.
The intervening two years have been a vertiginous whiplash-inducing ride for Batiste, as he looked to navigate Jaouad’s health and his ever-growing celebrity, an experience captured with grace and humility in the Netflix documentary American Symphony. Last month, Batiste capped off this roller-coaster journey by performing his nominated song from the film It Never Went Away at the Academy Awards.
Now on a world tour, which includes a stop in Vancouver on June 5, Batiste talked to The Globe and Mail about his mission of healing as the United States heads into a turbulent election cycle, his quest to embrace and expand music across cultures, and how a hospital lullaby led him to the Oscar stage.
It Never Went Away was originally written for an audience of one. How did it feel performing it for nearly 20 million people on the Oscars telecast?
Obviously, performing at the Oscars was a significant moment, career-wise, but you’re right. It Never Went Away started out as a lullaby for my wife, when she was in the hospital waiting on a second bone-marrow transplant. It wasn’t even a song when I made it, it was just healing frequencies on a piano. You know, when we were making the film, we didn’t even know she was going to [survive]. So all of this is wrapped up into this song.
And to perform it to her in front of the world, it’s just beyond. It’s inconceivable. I was so proud that she was there, healthy, living her life to the fullest. And we were there together. All that coming together as a testament to our love on stage at the Oscars was a surreal moment and one that our family is going to look back on forever.
The concept of using music to heal seems to be intrinsic in your art. Where does that belief come from?
My artistic practice is about bringing elements together that were never put together before. Since the beginning of time, music has been about people gathering, coming together to connect to something greater than themselves. That’s what social music is. It’s this idea that I can create this experience that’s rooted in millennia of rituals and endless ways of connection, and I reconfigure them into a genre all my own.
How do you do that without potentially appropriating the cultures you’re connecting?
It’s all about depth, baby. How deep do you go within yourself to find the commonalities within the thing that you’re drawing from? I come from one of the largest musical families in New Orleans and have been blessed with a real cultural inheritance. That’s one thing that makes me unique in the world of modern artists who are in popular culture, but then I couple that with a real dedication to studying – musically pushing myself to be as incredibly proficient as I can be. That allows me to take these raw elements in a very agnostic way and not copy them or create a pastiche of them.
In that way, when I collaborate with someone from another culture, it actually does what artists are supposed to do, which is to embrace and expand rather than take and own. That’s why I’m addicted to it. When you collaborate and create social music, it creates a frequency that transcends this sort of binary conversation that has stifled us in so many ways.
Obviously, you exist in a political climate that is defined by those binaries. How do you manage your vision with the reality around you?
We’re talking about things that are really nuanced, and they’re rarely spoken about with great detail or nuance. At our shows, I create a frequency that purges us of these sort of superficial identities that we assume in order to tribalize and break each other. It feels almost like a mass catharsis. It’s a revival feeling.
I may not always agree with some people in my audience. There’s been folks who have been in our crowd who have MAGA hats on. And I’m looking out there and I’m like, what would make this person think they would feel comfortable in this space? So I think it’s just a matter of me focusing on creating the vibration of what I’ve represented over the last decade or more, and letting that do the work, because it transcends the divide. It’s really, really, really hard to create, but it’s very, very easy to feel it, especially when you’re in the room. And the more I do it, I think it will continue to speak for me.
When you see a MAGA hat, your response is to embrace those people into that ‘vibration’?
When I’m in the position of activism, that’s when my expression of my views and policy desires come across in a very clear way. When I’m an artist on stage, and I’m creating this sense of community, I try not to focus on anybody or anything but leaving room for God to step in and do whatever is supposed to happen in that moment. It’s a faith walk.
That must take extreme restraint.
The vibration in a room is doing a whole lot of speaking. We just follow the spirit and see where it takes us.
This interview has been edited and condensed.