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.
