Jon Batiste: Deep Music Presented Simply

What you’re saying about the world being off-balance, it makes sense. I think that the American Songbook is one of our greatest paradoxes, and BIG MONEY speaks to that—because it’s this album so full of blues music, and folk music, and pop music, and funk music. It’s unpredictable, in the way that anything capturing the exciting and complex history of music should be. What about that excited you the most, getting to be this kind of musical anthropologist in your art?

It’s such a strikingly beautiful and equally haunting discovery, for the artist to make a sound that is equally aligned with the message and also an anthropological interest. I’ve always wanted to dig up the relics of the past and the pioneers and all the things that they left us, and go in-depth and study that music—and not only study it, but inhabit it. Being born in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to do that before I realized I was doing it, which was a blessing. But then to find the times aligning with a message that I feel compelled to share from a place of real authenticity. I feel I can say this with great clarity. That music being the perfect vehicle to be an allegory for going back to source, finding balance again—it’s such a gift when you arrive at a place like that as an artist, where your interests, and the things that you are rooting yourself in, and this phase of your life align with the message that you want to say and they all become one.

It’s literally “E pluribus unum”—the idea of this country and the story of this country and where this country is today—and it’s so foretold and held within the esthetic of the music and the story of the music. The album, because of that, is constantly working on at least three levels at every time. Every lyric, every tone of the band generating together, and all the rhythms and stories of those rhythms, and the stories of different cadences that we use in the lyrics and in the delivery of the vocals and the call-and-response—it’s such a deep thing that presents simply, and that’s what I love about great art. When I strive to make art, I want it to be that. And I really believe we achieved something that is so deep yet presents very simply.

I think one of the greatest tasks that a musician can be taken to is making thought-provoking music that you can dance to. How do you find bliss and vibrance while trying to survive? We’ve been asking that question for decades and especially right now. How have these songs gotten you closer to figuring it out?

First—the thought of where joy comes from and realizing, in so many ways, that it has to come from pain. Thinking about how, in New Orleans, we have such a relationship to that, even in death. My mentor, one of the last of the elders who taught us all in New Orleans, Edward “Kidd” Jordan, passed away and we did a parade for his funeral—a second-line parade through the street, playing our horns and dancing in the rain. This idea of transcendence and catharsis—the spiritual expression of music in its most joyous, most jubilant manifestation—is in the music of New Orleans, and all of that music comes from the deepest pain and the richest struggle, and the richness of the soil is because there’s blood in it. And you gotta understand that when you’re making music in a time where you want to speak to the darkness of the time but with joy. You have to find those sources and those ways of expression that have existed in different forms throughout history and have come from people who have struggled and have found a way to not only transcend the struggle, but to make art of it.

I draw inspiration from that. How do you pay homage to that and use elements of that, but build into the future? We really wanted to do that with this album, in a way that you felt the joy all the way through. The irony of the title being BIG MONEY and it being about this state of time, where greed is stretching us beyond the natural limits of our soul, of the environment, of people’s lifespans, most of the wealth is in the hands of only a few people who are amassing power and buying policy. It couldn’t be heavier subject matter, yet we wanted the joy to be the common thread through it all.

I love “PETRICHOR” and “LEAN ON MY LOVE,” but I was struck by how “MAYBE” is this unedited, as-it-happened recording that came soon after Dion got involved. Your work can be dense and ornamental and full of spectacular twists and shouts. What felt so powerful about just sitting at the piano and not only letting the energy do the talking, but letting that energy and that song be exactly what it was born as?

The nature of the album that we’re making—and have made—was honest, and stripped away, not from compositional devices or flash, because there’s definitely elements of using the craft to enhance the impact of the message. But it didn’t need any of that. The craft was already baked in, being that there is a sense of compositional direction and form, even though it was a very spontaneous capturing. More so than worrying about how to really go in and edit that, to the point where it felt like there was no other way it could be, it was already telling us it had arrived at that place, energetically. It was giving us the cue, “This is what I’m meant to be.” And when you have that feeling, it’s hard to describe. It’s an intuitive thing—like when you know a project is done, you can’t really say how you know. “It’s telling you” is the best way I could express it. It tells you, “I’m what I came here to be, thank you for being my doula into this realm.” That’s what it felt like when we listened back to it. It was early in the process, and every time we would refer back to it, it was very much the same result. The honesty of the lyric also is not something that you can edit or replicate, so I really felt that, in order to say true to the nature of what this album is and what that song is telling us it wants to be, it required us to make the decision to let it be on display as it were.

And collaboration has been the bedrock of your music since you started making it. You set a precedent on World Music Radio by packing that record with so many voices, like JID, Jon Bellion, Kenny G, and Lana Del Rey. This time, it’s more selective. Andra Day, Randy Newman, No ID (Dion Wilson)—what is it about working with other singers and other producers that makes you a better curator and performer?

I think about my position in my artistic ecosystem, in the world of Jon Batiste the artist, as not just a performer and a bandleader and a songwriter, but as a musical curator and a presenter. In that sense, I take a lot of cues from the folks who did this so well in their own musical worlds. You often see that they’re able to bring something out of the performers—that they present or that they collaborate with—that you may not have seen, or a perspective from their artistry that you may not have expected. That is a two-way street. It becomes something that I’m making, but it also creates an opportunity for the world to experience artists and producers through another lens. Dion was very instrumental in making that 2-week run of building this record happen. He, as I’d said before, was looking to make something that was different to what he had made in his career, and he was in a space where he had been exploring that for some time. That’s the perfect litmus test, that’s the perfect moment for me to invite someone under the tent of the Jon Batiste Revival—because it’s an opportunity for us to discover something together and to build something together, and that’s typically why I love collaboration. There’s this opportunity for discovery.

I think back to Duke Ellington and his great bands. On some of his albums, you have a cut where he’s not even playing the piano—and he’s one of the great pianists and composers of all time—and I find that that’s a beautiful way of approaching art and creativity, because it becomes communal. It’s less individualistic. We are in this time where the systems are made for the individual to step on stage, shine, and have their perspective be the supreme. There’s a supremacy of the individual. I’ve always believed that art and creativity and music is a communal act, and it should feel that way from its inception to the presentation of it. I’ve always wanted to be very intentional with who I collaborate with and align with where they are in their creative journey, but also create a space for everyone to feel welcome and for it to feel like a microcosm of what I believe the world could be at our most ideal state.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.