Jon Batiste: The American Symphony Interview

In director Matthew Heineman’s new Netflix documentary, American Symphony, journalist and musician Suleika Jaouad says, post nuptials with spouse, musician Jon Batiste, that “Jon has the greatest capacity for change and improvisation and growth of anyone I’ve ever met.” Little did they know that the entire year of 2022 would test that assessment of both of them, in the most grueling and gratifying ways.

By February 2022, Batiste was soaring on news of being lauded with 11 Grammy nominations for his album, We Are, and just about completed his American Symphony opus for its impending debut at Carnegie Hall. Jaouad was fresh on the heels of becoming a New York Times-bestselling author for her memoir Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. And then life took a very hard left turn when she was diagnosed with a recurrence of the leukemia that had been in remission for a decade.

At the time, Heineman was gearing up to film a documentary entirely about Batiste’s process of making and performing the one-night only American Symphony. Then, suddenly, the neat delineation we take for granted about the lines separating career, creation and homelife were obliterated. But exemplifying that trademark Batiste family ability to adapt, the documentary turned into a vérité style examination of how this extraordinary, creative couple overcame a year like no other.

It’s now early December 2023, with a year and change in the rearview mirror away from that time. Jaouad is in remission again and Batiste has six more Grammy nominations, this time for his genre-defying concept album World Music Radio, and he’s preparing for his very first formal tour starting in February 2024. Heineman’s documentary is also out in the world featuring an original Batiste song, “It Never Went Away.” The finished work is a movie that the couple admits is “hard to watch,” but is getting raves for its emotionally vulnerable look at how their love of creating—and each other—got them to the other side of such a tumultuous period.

Batiste hopped on a call with Paste to reflect on the lessons learned in going through the making of American Symphony and how it set the table for the next stage of his life journey.

The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

---

Paste: When in the development of the documentary American Symphony did the moment come when Matthew proposed that it cover more than just that composition and incorporate everything going on in your lives?

Jon Batiste: The first month, we decided to film. The second month, we got the news of the new diagnosis. And also about the 11 Grammy nominations in the same week. So it was something that felt like it was too big, on many levels, to ignore the other two storylines. But the question with a film is: How do you tell one unified story? So, it was more of an ongoing discussion rather than a moment of it being clear that that’s what we were doing. It was more just discussing how do we balance all of it? How do we really make sure that no storyline, or no narrative thread, is flattened or used as narrative tension, but doesn’t really get portrayed properly. So that was really an ongoing discussion.

You and Suleika both have public careers but maintained private personal lives prior to this doc. When you accept cameras coming into your life, 24/7, did that require that you both set some boundaries as to when and what was filmed?

It was always about a push and a pull dance with Matt in the improvised moments of life, where he would oftentimes be pushing for more. We were committed to giving an honest portrayal because it’s hard to always see a narrative with someone who’s sick and it’s this hero’s journey. But at the time, we didn’t know if the end of the film was gonna be positive or not. So just being committed to that, and then also committed to…as a public figure, I’ve witnessed this epidemic of loneliness where people think that we see just the highlights of people. So you think that everybody’s just living highlights, and you’re the only one that’s lonely when everybody has to face the human condition.

That’s the perfect segue to the vulnerability you exhibit in revealing your own battles with panic attacks, anxiety and the therapy you use to work through it. Those are moments you didn’t have to share in the doc, yet you do?

You have a great opportunity as a person who is in the public eye to share humanity and allow for people to see the rough edges. And that’s a way of unifying people, which is everything that I’ve done with my music. All the levels of excellence that I pursue in the craft, is all about synthesis and unity. It’s unifying people, unifying voices of music, and breaking barriers down. And in pursuing a documentary, the best ones that I’ve seen and the most transformative, are the ones where there’s a level of surrender. The subject kind of surrenders to the premise of making a documentary and everything is documented. This was 1500 hours of footage to make this film. So, 1500 hours of footage over seven months was a huge commitment. It wasn’t easy the whole time. But our family made a decision and we tried our best, all the way through, to keep it.

How involved were you both with the edit? Did you want to be part of that process or just see the finished film?

Well, he would give us cuts and the cuts would be different each time. The first cut being 4+ hours. You get a window into this process of storytelling that he’s operating from his edit bay. You get a sense of how it’s so important for certain aspects of the story to have input. For Suleika, she’s been a storyteller in New York and a broadcast journalist for a while. And for me, it’s the music and aspects of that side of the narrative and the cultural side of the narrative.

Really, we gave more input than he’s probably used to. But still, at the end of the day, he’s got to make the choices. The conversations that we have throughout the film continued into edit where it was us having conversations about portrayal. And bigger questions, mainly, just about what does it really feel like to have been there? He probably had those conversations with 1,000 other people in the process through all of it. But I think those conversations you have with the director, when they’re open to that and are welcoming that sort of conversation, can lead to some really interesting places. So I wasn’t in the edit room, but we definitely had input via our exchanges.

The American Symphony itself was a four-year odyssey of creation for you. But in the final sprint, not only was the original date delayed but on the night of the September 2022 debut, you had a total power failure on stage that you had to hide from the audience. What lessons did those two speed bumps impart to you and your collaborators?

It’s a huge lesson of just resilience. It takes a lot to do great things. And it also is a lot of teamwork, a lot of vision and foresight. But at the end of the day, the resilience of the human soul prevails when everybody is dedicated to the cause. We really all believed in this symphony and what it represented. All that was put into it to create this once-of-a-kind work. I know that for me, it was 20+ years. But it’s not just me standing on the shoulders of so many ancestors and giants of music and culture. I just feel like it couldn’t fail. Even with all things going against it, it just couldn’t fail.

I’m curious when World Music Radio started to make itself known to you. Was it after the multicultural collaborations for American Symphony?

I was doing [Symphony] at the same time as we made that album, believe it or not. There was an overlap so, oftentimes, I’m trying to blend things and break down barriers of what may seem like disparate influences. And that’s a big part of what kind of seeped into the [World Music Radio] album from the process of writing this symphony. The symphony was finished first, before the album was done, but they overlapped.

Also, there’s a little Easter egg in there for those who are watching the film. When you look at the audience at the symphony, those with eagle eyes will see, in the audience, my executive producer from the album, Jon Bellion, is in a shot for about two or three seconds in the audience. We were literally in sessions together, John and I, the week leading to the premiere of American Symphony. And during the next day or two after the premiere, we were back in the studio. After the Grammys in 2021, my very next focus was the symphony, actually. And I went right into it. Then a few months into that process being mounted, I started to get ideas of songs and a vision for World Music Radio which led to sessions. Really, they kind of bookended each other in terms of the process of one coming to life and the other incubating. And then the other comes into life thereafter. There’s a lot of carryover just philosophically and all the lessons that I learned sonically. So it’s a big thing to have both things now out in the world at the same time.

You had said in a previous interview that American Symphony is never meant to be completely finished. How do you want the symphony to exist going forward? Will you ever put out a recording of it?

Yeah, yeah! I want to do a record and I have a recording. It’s coming and it’s gonna be the live performance from Carnegie.

With all of these projects finished and Suleika in the next stage of her healing, does all of it represent the end of a creative chapter for you both?

Before all of this, it felt like we were in a space of really harvesting a lot of things that had been seasoned and planted and moving in that direction. And then we had these huge interruptions and unexpected surprises. I left my role on The Late Show and had this incredible night at the Grammys, and all these things had happened which sort of changed my life in a way that was the same for Suleika with her book, and her isolation journals community coming out of the pandemic. And all the incredible things she had done. And then it was like, this was almost just such an unexpected shift. The film was going to be a pretty low key thing. The film was really just to have a fly on the wall to document the process of the symphony. And it wasn’t going to be such a big chronicle of life in the moment in the way that it became.

With more and more career things vying for your time, how do you replenish as an artist so you can tap into what you need to with your music?

You know, finding the time to be still is really such a replenishment. There’s so many things in life that are built to almost entertain us, or to kind of help us to have recreation. But they take us away from stillness, which I think is the ultimate rest and ultimate replenishment. It’s finding that time, and disciplining myself to do that. We just did three days of stillness before this next heavy run of stuff that’s coming up. I feel more replenished now than I have in months. And that’s just from three days of literally kind of going off the grid to the farm that we go to. You know, it can be an easy thing to find stillness within yourself if you can find a room, even just for an hour, or 10 minutes or one minute to sit still with your thoughts. That’s the key for me. That’s a big, big key, as simple as it sounds.

Trying to carve out time in a day feels like it should be easy. But making space for it is hard amongst the eternal grind of the day-to-day.

I’m so glad you said that, “the eternal grind,” because we have these devices so there’s so much information. It’s really like that.

Since you worked on American Symphony and World Music Radio concurrently, do you anticipate the tour inspiring ideas for your next album?

Yeah, yeah, I have ideas that come on the road. And it becomes stuff. But funnily enough, I’ve never been on the road. And that’s, a whole new experience to kind of channel all of the energies into a show on a consistent basis like that. But because that’s the case, I’m anticipating it being a lot of different things that come from it, that I have not experienced. This is a very intimate tour in theaters where you’re talking about 2000 to 3000 people in these settings where we’re in the country, during this election cycle. There’s so much division and so much tension, but also so much opportunity for transformation, and healing. We call it “purifying the airwaves” because it’s really a focus on that sort of frequency. The shows, more so than anything, are going to be like a spiritual practice. It’s going to feel like you’re experiencing something that’s more than just entertainment. I’m glad that we’re able to step out on tour for the first time in this kind of environment when I feel like the country really needs it.

You have been so vocal about many social causes that are near and dear to you, but some people would say that a tour is the place to be agnostic about those topics. Is there an opportunity to still have a conversation on your tour about these things with your music?

Well, I think that we’ll have a lot of things that are happening that are surrounding the tour for those who want to partake in that. And through my family foundation and things like that, we’ll address that. But in general, the music is the thing that I feel in our lifetime, and just over many, many generations, has been the one thing that people can agree on.

It’s like what—outside of the arts and the creative spirit—has gotten people into a room that don’t agree on anything else? That’s a powerful thing to get people who don’t agree on anything into a room to celebrate together. And that’s ultimately the main focus of what we’re going to be doing out there. But that in and of itself is a radical act. And it’s an act of protest against division. And protesting against the things that make us less human.

Watch Jon Batiste perform live at the Paste Studio in 2018 below.

---

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and the upcoming Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen.