Oscar-winning composer Jon Batiste: ‘I see jazz as a superpower’

In June 2020, the composer and pianist Jon Batiste was on the move. During the week, he was scoring Pixar’s first Black-led feature, Soul, from his dressing room at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where he works as the bandleader for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. He was finishing the music for his eighth album, We Are, while also composing a 40-minute symphony that will be performed by more than 200 musicians at Carnegie Hall next May. And on the weekends, he would then assemble a group of fellow players and march on the streets of New York, singing songs such as We Shall Overcome and Down By the Riverside to protest about the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police.

“We were protesting to reaffirm our humanity,” a baritone-voiced Batiste says over a call from his New York home. “When George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed, Black people started to feel like our value as human beings was being stripped away – and we needed to speak to that in our own way, through music.” On Juneteenth – the date that commemorates the emancipation of African-American enslaved people – Batiste’s marches came to a head as the 34-year-old led a crowd of more than 10,000 people to Brooklyn public library, only a day after police had clashed with other protesters in the area. “There was a lot of tension in the air, since people had just gotten nailed by the authorities, but we showed up and it was the songs that brought us together, rather than to fight,” he says. “That is the power of social music.”

“Social music” is the catch-all term Batiste uses to describe his varied, jazz-referencing output. Born into a New Orleans musical dynasty, he first played drums at eight years old in the family group, the Batiste Brothers Band, before switching to piano and developing his ear by transcribing scores from video games such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. By 17, he was immersed in the language of jazz and had already released his debut album, Times in New Orleans. Within the decade he had graduated from the prestigious Juilliard School, toured globally and counted the likes of Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock among his friends and mentors.

“All my work comes from within and each album is a record of a specific moment in time and in my life,” he says. “Which is why this latest record speaks to the protests that were happening. It is saying that as humans we all come from a common ancestry and lineage. Only we are the ones who can save ourselves. As long as there are evil forces in the world, the work is never finished.”

As he speaks, it becomes clear – in the manner in which he channels the pulpit’s emphatic mode of phrasing – that several of Batiste’s relatives are preachers. Indeed, it is hard to view his lauded career to date and not see him as marked out for success by a benevolent force. This year alone, he became only the second Black composer to win an Oscar (following Herbie Hancock’s 1986 win) for his work on Soul, has been nominated twice at this month’s Jazz FM awards and is currently undertaking a curatorial residency at Carnegie Hall.

He sees We Are as his crowning achievement. “This is my debut in many ways, since it’s my first record on a label that speaks to who I am now as a grown-ass man,” he says. “It was made when I was 33, which is the year Jesus was crucified, so it marks an age of becoming, when so many great musicians like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder made their finest work, too.” If We Are doesn’t quite reach the boundary-breaking genius of What’s Going On or Songs in the Key of Life, its sprawling 14 tracks traverse the gamut of Black American music and his own history, featuring the marching band from his old high school, his classmate Trombone Shorty and voice recordings from his niece and nephew – as well as famous friends Zadie Smith and Mavis Staples. “The rebirth and evolution of Jon Batiste,” is how he frames it.

For all the third-person pronouncements, Batiste’s success has inarguably been pivotal in introducing a wider audience to jazz, not least through inviting the likes of saxophonist Wayne Shorter and Philadelphia group the Heath Brothers to perform in front of an audience of millions on The Late Show. “I see jazz as a superpower,” he says. “It has never depended on popularity to maintain relevance because its value is undeniable; it represents all the nuances of the human soul. It is an honour to play this music because it is my heritage – it is the Blackest, deepest American classical music that has grown to become a universal art form. Jazz shows you that something can be from a specific experience and it can be adapted in a way that’s not appropriated.”

Batiste, who joined The Late Show in 2015, sees his role as unique in mainstream US television. “There are very few people who look like me in these spaces and I speak to things that I don’t hear anyone else bringing up on television,” he says. “I’m always humbled by the influence we can have on our audiences.”

Since he was 21, Batiste has also been involved with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, where he is now creative director, another role in which he uses jazz as a means of bringing people together. His programmes of events, held in a Harlem church basement, have seen the likes of the Cotton Club dancer Jacquie “Tajah” Murdock perform for an audience that might include “Mary from the corner store and Philip from the barber shop” as well as Lenny Kravitz.

It is this focus on representation for all walks of life that spurs on Batiste’s prodigious output. “It’s such a big deal for someone who looks like me and who is my age to get recognition and to win an Oscar for a movie about jazz that has a Black lead,” he says. “There is pressure in being a trailblazer, to somehow represent and uplift your community, but you don’t get many chances in life to succeed and it makes me tear up thinking about what this could mean to the next me, looking on.”

Continuing to carry the mantle, Batiste has a series of high-profile projects to come – including a Broadway musical on the life of the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the premiere of his Carnegie Hall orchestral work, American Symphony.

“I’ve been working on this for three and a half years, writing my scores by hand,” he says. “And I’m proud to say it will be the first time in 130 years of Carnegie Hall that an all-Black orchestra has a featured performance. We’re going to make history and show everyone why we’re here, since the work is never done.”

The Jazz FM Awards 2021 will be livestreamed on Jazz FM on 28 October from 7.30pm.

Watch: 'Late Show' Band Leader Jon Batiste Is Having A Big Year!