Jon Batiste makes the whole lot appear easy. The singer, pianist, and bandleader of The Late Present With Stephen Colbert has a terrific and ingenuous smile, attire fantastically, comes from a household that’s musical royalty in New Orleans, performs a number of totally different devices, and will appeal the stink off a skunk. He’s even made the melodica appear cool.
However as Batiste explains, the lengthy listing of accolades—which embrace being named considered one of Time’s Most Influential Folks, 5 Grammy wins, and internet hosting and acting at President Joe Biden’s first state dinner—have been the end result of a long-term wrestle and, repeatedly, his biggest successes have been paired with grave troubles. “In the event you take a look at my journey, it’s an insult to name it a rollercoaster,” he says. “It’s greater than that.”
The identical week he was nominated for 11 Grammys in November 2021, his companion, the journalist and New York Occasions best-selling creator Suleika Jaouad, was recognized with a second bout of leukemia. They married three months later however didn’t honeymoon, as a result of she had a bone marrow transplant the subsequent day. The day after Batiste gained a historic Album of the Yr Grammy for We Are in April 2022, Jaouad went again into Memorial Sloan Kettering Most cancers Middle in New York, and he spent three weeks sleeping on a hospital sofa.
She’s at the moment cancer-free, Batiste says, however he additionally makes it clear that there’s nonetheless lots to wrestle with. “It hasn’t stopped,” he says with an easygoing snort.
Batiste places so much on his shoulders, as is clear from his bold and sprawling new album, World Music Radio, which makes an attempt nothing lower than the peaceable coalition of a United Nations of various musical kinds. The album, which is narrated by Batiste within the fictional guise of a DJ, Billy Bob Bo Bob, has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, and Korean, songs that scramble up R&B, rap, jazz, gospel, reggaeton, and nation, and visitor artists from Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, France, Catalonia, England, and Korea along with rapper Lil Wayne, singer Lana Del Rey, the Native American music group Native Soul, and smooth-sax grasp Kenny G. The album credit are practically as prolonged because the crawl on the finish of a Marvel film.
Though the success of We Are made him well-known, he’d been prolific even earlier than its launch in March 2021, amassing a catalog with 5 albums, 4 stay data, eight EPs, the Oscar-winning soundtrack to the Pixar movie Soul, and some collaborative albums. He started to conjoin a wide range of kinds with the 2013 album Social Music, a title that has turn into a type of mantra for him, to explain his perfect of music; soulful, enjoyable, and accessible with out sacrificing its thoughtfulness.
Throughout an unusually heavy and philosophical 50-minute telephone dialog from the Brooklyn house he and Jaouad share, Batiste talked about how Pink Floyd influenced him, why he wished Kenny G on World Music Radio, what he realized throughout Black Lives Matter protests, and the origin of what he calls psychosis in America.
GQ: It’s fairly frequent to listen to New Orleans musicians liken the town’s music to a gumbo with a lot of totally different elements. That’s legitimate, but it surely’s not as exact because it may very well be. By way of World Music Radio, the essential element about New Orleans is that it’s a port metropolis, proper?
Jon Batiste: Completely. The port metropolis magic is actual. It’s humorous, as a result of [Pink Floyd’s] Darkish Facet of the Moon was an affect on this report, much less sonically and extra by way of the conception of portals opening up throughout the narrative thread of the album. I take into consideration port cities and portals as being synonymous. And with Darkish Facet of the Moon, the listener has to determine the language—how am I being guided by way of these totally different worlds, and when is a portal opening up? The entire conception of a portal is without doubt one of the issues that World Music Radio makes use of to convey a story.
Does the portal take you to New Orleans?
There’s a particular second the place it does. I’m New Orleans to my bones, so I don’t ever should deliberately go there. The rhythms I play, the DNA of Social Music, my complete method to stay efficiency, all of it’s knowledgeable by a robust genetic code of New Orleans within the DNA of Jon Batiste. It’s coded in.
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