Vanity Fair, August 15, 2023
Jon Batiste is on the move. When he answers my call, I catch him in the car, feeling “in the zone” as he gradually closes the distance from his home in New York City to Newport, Rhode Island. A few days ago he was visiting New England to deliver a standout set for the long-running Newport Folk Festival. The 36-year-old singer-songwriter, bandleader, composer, and multi-instrumentalist is now circling back to perform for the town’s sister event, the Newport Jazz Festival.
It’s rare for any musical artist to perform at both festivals in the same year. Batiste says he’s the first to do so a second time. “There’s an amazing lineage with both festivals and it’s a beautiful thing to have been honored in this way,” he says. “I really don’t take it lightly.”
Over the last few years Batiste has been experiencing a lot of beautiful things in his life. For starters, in 2020, he, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross composed the music for Pixar and Disney’s animated feature Soul, and they went on to win the Golden Globe, BAFTA Award, and Academy Award. The following year Batiste received 11 nominations at the 64th annual Grammy Awards for his breakout solo record, We Are, taking home five trophies, including album of the year. In 2022, Time magazine named him one of the year’s top 100 most influential people. All of these professional achievements pale in comparison to the fact that his wife, journalist and author Suleika Jaouad, is “surviving and really thriving,” he says, after a bone marrow transplant that was successful in treating a returning leukemia diagnosis.
Batiste, formerly the house bandleader for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, somehow, in his own very strange and wonderful way, skipped one of the rites of passage for any band or performer. “I’ve never toured,” he says as though he were Benjamin Button–ing through the life of a successful musician. “I’m an artist where there’s all these things I’ve done, but I’ve never been the on-the-road artist yet.”
Fortunately for Batiste, he’s developed the perfect passport for his forthcoming travel itinerary, his new album, World Music Radio. Where We Are served as an inward, intimate autobiographical statement on Batiste’s upbringing, influences, and racial identity, World Music Radio turns the lens outward past the broad horizons of the American-centric perspective, blending cultural legacies in a way that celebrates what Batiste calls “true diversity: this idea that I aspire to and I ascribe to that genres don’t really exist.”
Batiste recently spoke with Vanity Fair about refining his big ideas and collaborating with other artists as well as the inspirations behind his new album.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: What was the goal when you started brainstorming the concept of this record?
Jon Batiste: I always think about a philosophy when I start an album and the philosophy that I started with on this record was how world music and popular music have become more and more synonymous with each other over the last decade. There's a new normal, and everyday it's expanding. The term “world music” for such a long time has been a problematic, marginalizing term. It's basically meant anything that's not in America or Europe, right? It's categorized as exotic. And I was like, if that term actually meant what it could mean, and if we actually look at what's happening in popular music, that's what it is. You got artists from Africa, Asia, artists from South America and all of these different regions just dominating and that's exciting to me. It speaks to these previously marginalized lineages, these traditions that are so powerful and are just expanding more and more — and even if it's not overt — are being recognized on the biggest stages. That was the beginning of the idea, my response to that prompt.
Your previous record We Are, was an incredibly personal work capturing these vignettes of your musical influences and your journey as a musical artist. How do you go from something so close and self-reflective to something so expansive in its point of view?
With any project I realize that it's a version of something that I started at some point in the past, even if it's not the distant past. I'm constantly refining. A friend of mine, who is a great musician, told me that every artist, even the greatest of the great, only really have two or three ideas. And over a lifetime, they just keep refining those ideas, and recreating them in different forms and different mediums and manifesting them in different ways as they evolve and grow. And just as We Are is a mode of Jon Batiste, World Music Radio is another mode. In my mind an album I made 10 years ago, Social Music, was my first attempt at making World Music Radio. After not hearing it for a while I recently revisited that album and I listened to it again and I thought, "Oh, yeah. This was that idea." My whole musical philosophy is what I call social music. I named the record Social Music as a kind of manifesto, that this is what I'm gonna build out into the world. That was the first time, but not everything was aligned for it to be World Music Radio. So it was Social Music, which was in its own way important in terms of my artistic evolution. You have things that are seminal markers of that evolution and Social Music is one, but World Music Radio is the realization of a concept that I began 10 years ago.
It must have been quite the task to take all these eclectic and sometimes even dissonant styles of music and find ways in which they could complement each other.
That's the key. How do you present them? How do you connect dots [that] haven't been connected before? How do you take sounds and rhythms that have chemistry but maybe haven't met before? And sonically, how do you create an album that tells the story from beginning to end, even within a song where you may go into 14 different places? How do you make it feel like one?
The epiphany moment came eight or nine months into the process with this Billy Bob Bo Bob character, this interstellar griot who's guiding you through the album, creating this environment and the feeling of a radio broadcast. The World Music Radio ethos is so embodied on the album by having this central figure. He's this Willy Wonka storytelling being that is somehow connected to the people but you also don't know how long he's been around, where he's come from, and where he's going, carrying all of the places that he's been to with him. The way he dresses, he has these incredible headphones with these antennas that come out and he has this mix of different regalia, someone who's very fashionable but completely off kilter and unorthodox. This character is broadcasting from this RV-like vehicle that is flying around the galaxy, capturing frequencies from all around the universe, mixing sounds from the past, the present, the future, and even live performances that could be happening in real time together. He's constantly looking for what he calls, "The Vibe," so he could be finding something with the Vibe in Jamaica and blending that with a performance that's happening in India. Then he's putting on a record, and putting the beat from that record into these two performances that are happening and then someone is singing the hook live from the World Music Radio station.
You frequently collaborate with other artists. On this record alone you have Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne, Kenny G, and a whole host of performers who are icons in their native countries. How would you describe your approach to communicating with these performers who specialize in these very specific genres?
I'm always looking at collaborations with other artists and figuring out not only what they're trying to communicate, but I'm always looking at it from the perspective of process. I am a real believer in the process being the ultimate destination. If you can find a way to get on the same wavelength with other artists like a team, it becomes a way of being. It becomes a culture. People will ask, how do you span so many different things? How do you find your way into so many things authentically? It's just being obsessed with processing and being willing to not only have the curiosity and the interest to study, but then adapt what works best for me, and thus expand my own personal process. I'm constantly expanding because of that. There's not any one way to create for me. There's not any one approach and there's not really any overall value other than the value of quality.
There’s a line between honoring something with authenticity and letting it fall into the realm of appropriation. How did you navigate that with all these different cultural musical forms?
What is beautiful about influence is when you have an approach to something that's based on your experience, the way you metabolize influence doesn't become appropriation. If you're thinking of your experience, certain things just don't fit. I've thought about how someone could get into a position where they actually are unclear about that. And then I realized, 'Oh, they're thinking about how much they love the thing that they're witnessing, and how much they want to be a part of it, but they haven't done the vital step of connecting it to their own experience. And sometimes that connection may not be there, or may not be there in a way that you want it to be. So then when you start to create, it's derivative and at worst is appropriating. But when you say for example, ah, this rhythm from this tribe is similar to the rhythm that has been played when I was growing up in New Orleans in the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. What if I took this and blended it with the rhythm from my childhood? We created this new thing. Now that takes a certain level of awareness, but it also takes a level of skill. And that's what I've been studying my entire life. It's going about combining the awareness and the respect, but also connecting it to my theory so I'm never doing a derivative version or second rate version. I'm always doing something that is influenced by things, but is always wholly me. And then, as an artist, how do I execute on that? That takes the craft. That's the 10,000 hours on instruments and in the studio and saying, ‘How do I execute this and not feel like I'm stumbling over myself where it doesn't fit or is not connecting sonically?’
This album feels like a journey into some very beautiful cultures and locations. Was there a kind of wish fulfillment in the making of this record to connect with these places that you were getting inspired by, even if you had never actually physically visited them?
A big part of the success of this album, as far as my artistic vision is concerned, is the tour to come. I did a lot of traveling during the recording of the record, but at a certain point – and this speaks to the question of how I metabolized the influences of certain things – I decided, ‘Oh, let me plant the seed by bringing in an expert," like Native Soul on ‘Rain Dance’ or Rita Payés on ‘My Heart,’ the person who can speak to this best. Once they speak to this, now it sets up this environment that we can create onstage and on the tour, so when I go to this region of the world, the show becomes the version of the show that is specifically rooted in this region. And not only will this featured musician join us on that show, but this musician and maybe some of the local up and coming musicians, and also some of the local legends and all the different range of artists and collaborators who we can bring on the show. So it becomes a celebration of this community.
World Music Radio affords us the opportunity with all of these incredible seeds we've planted to create a touring experience and a live performance that is so unique in the world. I've never seen anything quite like what we have the opportunity to do with this tour. And it will be my first tour ever. I'm so excited because not only did we make the album and the narrative with Billy Bob Bo Bob as this guide, and we have all these incredible things going on visually and sonically, but the tour is the final step to really manifesting it. And it's such a long time coming for me. I really am very, very excited to hit the road.