On a Friday night at New York City’s Brooklyn Steel, Jon Batiste is giddily dancing around the stage while blowing into a melodica, the handheld instrument that resembles a mini-keyboard. His new album, World Music Radio, came out earlier today and here in Williamsburg it’s part-show, part-celebration. Naturally, Batiste is in characteristically high spirits.
Batiste is playing the album’s Stevie Wonder-influenced Calling Your Name, a two-minute song that he stretches into a roughly 15-minute freestyle during which he jumps into the audience and parades around before plucking four members from the crowd, ushering them onstage and having them take turns singing and dancing. It’s a unique spectacle composed of equal parts pop anthem and jazz freestyle, all delivered with a distinct flavor of his native New Orleans (his family is a fixture in the town’s music scene and as a result Batiste has a penchant for leading theater crowds out into the street). It also demonstrates an artist at the intersection of a lifetime of performances on a litany of stages with a mainstream perch he’s continually finding the apex of.
“This might be your last chance to dance,” he proclaims into the microphone as the drummer taps his cymbal to a perky beat. “You live once. This moment is once. This night is once. That’s it.”
That cheery attitude isn’t an act. Offstage, Batiste’s habit for seeing life’s bigger picture is just as dominant in his mindset, seeping into everything he does. “Mindfulness is such a big part of what I do,” he explained a couple days earlier in an interview. “Particularly with art, it’s about the person transmuting their experiences. You can’t make it if you don’t live it. You can’t be the thing you’re aspiring to in your art, if you’re not that as a person.”
However Batiste sees himself and his art, it seems to be working, judging by acclaim alone. Consider the recent evidence: last year, he won an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their score for the animated Disney hit Soul. A few months later, he followed that up with a Grammy win for album of the year, with Batiste the most nominated artist at last year’s ceremony. With that, he subsequently departed his seven-year-long gig as bandleader for Stay Human, the house band for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and dove headfirst into World Music Radio, a sonic victory lap that sounds like someone with the industry at his fingertips.
“Overnight a lot of stuff changed, but also a lot of stuff was in the making for years,” says Batiste of the Grammy win. “The album is a culmination of a lot of things artistically, philosophically, and in my life.” One sign that Batiste was on that cumulative journey dawned on him as he was handed the album of the year Grammy from presenter Lenny Kravitz. A longtime supporter of Batiste who used to sit in with his band when he was still performing New York-area basement shows (“We were always your favorite band’s favorite band”), here he was receiving the biggest award in music from his mentor.
It was a nice moment, but Batiste has never chased his accolades. In fact, he has a mantra: the end result is not as important as the process. “I absolutely live by that,” he says. “I find that if you focus on the end result verses the process, it changes your state. Your state ultimately is the thing that’s most important, more than a melody.”
But before he could dive head-first into World Music Radio, he reached a crossroads with The Late Show. After originally taking a temporary leave of absence last year, Colbert later announced on-air that he actually wasn’t coming back after all (his band, Stay Human, would stay behind). And after the camaraderie the host and bandleader shared, there was no grand farewell and Batiste hasn’t returned since.
“When the decision was mutually made for me to move forward, it was during the Late Show’s longest break of the summer and I had already started working on World Music Radio,” he recalls of the roots of the album’s intense creative process which centered on Malibu’s iconic Shangri-La studios. “So when it came to the Late Show, the choice was to come back and do a farewell show or continue to record. So what we decided was that I’ll come back at some point.” Batiste notes that the ongoing writers’ strike squashed any plan for him to come on to promote his current album. “Me and Stephen are friends for life. You don’t go through something like that and not bond with the person who you’ve been onstage with for seven years.”
Back in Shangri-La (appropriately run by fellow mindful-master Rick Rubin) Batiste exploded with creativity. He moved there for a period of months and embarked on a quest to create a musical world of “zero limitations”.
“It was about getting these ideas out of my unconscious mind, and we had engineers, musicians and producers rolling through 24/7 whenever I wanted to record or jam.” That also includes a starry list of featured artists who found their way on to the record from Lana Del Rey (a collaboration seven years in the making after a mutual friend set them up ) and Lil Wayne (they grew up not far from each other in New Orleans). Along the way, he perfected his sound, a singular one he dubs Social Music. “I never really adhered to genre, so I wanted to just name and define not only the music, but the philosophy behind it.”
Batiste was already introspective growing up (he thinks it could be because he didn’t speak until he turned 10), but his cheery demeanor and stunning success is continually put to the test watching the struggles of his wife, the 35-year-old writer Suleika Jaouad. They met when they were pre-teens, reconnected a decade later and have been devoted to each other since, including through Jaouad’s multiple bouts of cancer. Right around the time Batiste became the Grammys’ most nominated artist, Jaouad was re-diagnosed with leukemia, which she’s battled since she was 22. The two subsequently married last February, the day before she was scheduled to undergo a bone marrow transplant. For Batiste, it was a whiplash of life’s extremes.
“She’s doing incredible,” he says of Jaouad’s current prognosis. “She’s incredible how she’s able to do so much, while also coming out of such an invasive and deeply draining type of treatment.” Experiencing those high highs and low lows only served to cement Batiste’s outlook. “Ultimately the duality of life is perception,” he says. “It’s about knowing how to conduct the symphony of the life, with every section comes together, from the oboes to the strings. Sometimes it can get very intense. And you have to know how to reach your center, like a conductor conducts an orchestra. So what I’ve learned is to center yourself: where are those places, what are your practices and who are those people? Hold on to all of that, and use those things to conduct the best possible life that you can.”
Back onstage at Brooklyn Steel Batiste is, no doubt, in one of the places that centers him. Still, after a nearly two-hour show, he’s ready to call it a night.
“I’ve loved the energy that’s in here right now,” he says into the mic as he begins to wrap up. “I’m so grateful for y’all.”
World Music Radio is out now
