‘You can't cancel the soul': Jon Batiste on Stephen Colbert and the end of The Late Show

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

The irony is not lost on Jon Batiste. Just as he's releasing his new album Big Money, his old TV show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, is at the centre of the culture wars, cancelled by network CBS in what many have called an obvious move to appease Donald Trump, after Colbert had publicly chastised CBS's parent company Paramount's $16 million settlement with Trump as a 'big fat bribe' to gain federal approval for its $8 billion sale to Skydance. Big money, indeed.
'We're in a time where big money can challenge free speech, and that's what we're seeing happen with my friend Stephen. But his soul can never be cancelled,' says Batiste, who with his band Stay Human was the show's original bandleader from its premiere in September 2015 until he departed in August 2022. 'Wherever he ends up going from here, I'm rooting for him because I know he's going to find an even bigger and better place for his voice to resonate.'
For Batiste, the Late Show 's cancellation is indicative of a wider societal ill he was already contemplating on Big Money. 'And it's not just one candidate, one person, one government,' he says. ' Big Money, literally, is about how these things are manifesting for creatives, how it's stripping people of a certain sense of innocence too early, how it's making us lose track of the joy of living.'
He's optimistic for his friend, who's not been holding back on air. 'With Stephen, I'm not discouraged by anything that's happening right now, because I know him and I know this has to happen,' says Batiste. 'But for all the truth tellers, the seekers, the teachers, the griots, the leaders, the community organisers, we just gotta keep on pushing and using our voices. Because you can't cancel the soul. You cannot cancel the soul.'
Born and raised in a New Orleans jazz dynasty, Batiste – now 38; he's studied piano since he was 11 – was just a couple of years out of Juilliard and barely 28 when he shot to global prominence as a nightly fixture on Colbert's show. 'I was the youngest band leader of a variety show in the history of American television, so you can imagine for me, there was such a shift.'
Before that, he'd been toiling in New York's underground, playing shows in basements, warehouses and subway carriages, with what he termed 'social music'. 'I was trying to disrupt the jazz and classical worlds, and redefine what a musician could be in the 21st century,' he says.
Artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Lenny Kravitz (who'd later hand Batiste his album of the year Grammy for We Are) would seek out his shows; Questlove of The Roots (another fellow TV bandleader) once listed Batiste in a three-way tie with Prince and Beyonce as his favourite performances of the year. 'I was your favourite band's favourite band,' says Batiste. 'And then, all of a sudden, I'm on television every night for millions of people.'
It disrupted his musical identity. Even now, he seems eager to note that he was always more than just a bandleader on a late-night show. 'People once knew me as the kid from New Orleans, or the child prodigy at Juilliard, or the kid in the Lower East Side playing the child's toy, the melodica, with his band on the subway. So by the time people were seeing me on the show, you were seeing me in, like, my fourth era!' Batiste says.
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'I'm grateful for the show, but I was on a path that, in many ways, had nothing to do with the show. I was building my own artistic world, an ecosystem of musicians and collaborators and records that I'd been making on my own.'
After the sprawling, collaborative opuses that were We Are and World Music Radio, Big Money is a pivot for Batiste: sparse and stripped back, raw and unbothered. 'One take, no overdubs, no autotune. It's just a band in a room, playing on the same wavelength, and you've got to capture lightning in a bottle. We did the whole album that way.'
It was inspired by Batiste's first time touring the US last year, with just a guitar in his hand and a growing irritation around the genre term 'Americana'. 'In the US, it's an umbrella term used to capture our essence, our mythology, the symbolism and the artefacts and the sound that represents the whole of our national identity – and I thought, man, a lot of stuff has been left out of the equation. Things like gospel, spirituals, soul, blues, jazz,' says Batiste.
On the other side of town, also working with Batiste's collaborator Dion 'No ID' Wilson, Beyonce was contemplating a similar idea, which is how Batiste found himself contributing to Cowboy Carter 's American Requiem. The synergy was obvious. Back on his turf, he finished recording Big Money in less than two weeks.
'That's how I make art. I don't force it. I don't follow industry trends. I don't follow the cadence of release. It's even ill-advised to put out two albums this close to each other that are that different,' Batiste says, citing Beethoven Blues, his classical album released last November. 'But I have to follow the muse.'
The album's title track embraces the rawness of early rock and roll, while Maybe, featuring Batiste alone at the piano in a Nina Simone-esque improvisation, might be his most striking work to date. Batiste calls it a 'milestone in my recorded discography'.
'That song is literally what I sat down and played in the first five minutes after walking into the piano booth,' he says. 'I've maybe channelled a verse before, or a verse and a chorus, but I've never spontaneously composed a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, outro, no edits, boom!'
On Lonely Avenue, he even calls in a favour from LA's most acclaimed piano troubadour, Randy Newman. 'I'm the king of cold calling, right? If I meet you and I feel there's a connection, I won't know when or how, but seven years might go by and I'll call you out of the blue,' laughs Batiste.
He first met Newman over a decade ago in Washington DC when the pair were lobbying Congress for songwriters' rights. 'I love calling elders. I'll call an elder and I'll just ask questions. That's one of the great things about being famous, just having the ability to call people you admire,' says Batiste. 'He's a soundtrack to my childhood. We both scored Pixar films. He's into Ray Charles, who is one of my top three of all time. I knew we would have a lot to talk about. We recorded in his living room, one take, quick set up, no fuss. It's the spirit of this album.'
Batiste is at home in Brooklyn when we speak. Behind him on a mantelpiece sit two golden statues, a Grammy and an Emmy – the Emmy is his wife's, the author and New York Times columnist Suleika Jaouad, he's quick to point out.
The couple's relationship was featured in the award-winning documentary American Symphony, which captured Jaouad's second battle with leukaemia, at the same time as Batiste was preparing a symphony to premiere at Carnegie Hall. In the film, their stoic positivity in the face of such personal upheaval is remarkable.
'No matter how hard we work or how much money or status we have, we can't add a millisecond to our life on the balance sheet. The reality of being alive is such a precious gift, so as someone with a platform I think we're called to shine a light on how incredible it is for us to be here,' says Batiste.
'It's hard for me to see anything that's of greater value or service to the world, and at my best I'm resonating from that place. So when we were going through the heavy time, we felt it was important to keep the cameras on. It was only six months of our life, but it felt like everything.'
The same exuberance is there in his viral YouTube videos, a series in which Batiste listens to famous pop songs for the first time and breaks them down to their essential appeal. Watching him enthusiastically discover, say, The Beastie Boys' Sabotage is a wholesome experience, like seeing a child discover lollipops.
'I've been doing that since high school in the band room, you know? People would come up to me like 'Can you play this song?', just 'cause I hear music and I can play it,' says Batiste. 'It's fun. If you hang with me, I'm always doing that.'
Growing up in a jazz dynasty, you might assume pop music was frowned upon as unserious in the Batiste household, hence his cultural gaps. 'On the contrary,' he says, 'I missed a lot of popular music because I was immersed in video game music. I was more of a gamer than a musician. If you talk about video game scores from the 1990s, my bag is deep.'
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It's a wild revelation to me, but the evidence is out there. In the past, Batiste has flown to Japan to meet his idols like Nobuo Uematsu, the composer on Final Fantasy VII – 'one of the greatest game scores ever made' he says – and even recorded Green Hill Zone, the score for the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog, on his album Hollywood Africans.
'I know that in culture I represent jazz or classical music, but I listen to everything, man: video game scores, Astor Piazzolla, Kendrick Lamar,' Batiste says. Plus, he has other ways of plugging in his pop gaps these days. 'Somebody will play something for me and they'll be like, 'You heard this?' and I'm like, 'No', and they're like, 'This is the biggest song in the world!' and I'll be like, 'Oh, so that's Billie! That's my friend.''