MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
You've heard that saying, if you stay ready, then you don't have to get ready?
JON BATISTE: (Singing) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Hey, hey. Yeah.
MARTIN: (Humming) OK. That's Jon Batiste. And that's how we started our interview, which won't surprise anybody who's ever watched the effervescent, Grammy- and Oscar-winning band leader, songwriter and TV personality. It all started in Louisiana as a classical piano student. He went on to degrees in jazz piano at Juilliard. He's now returning to those early years. And this week, he's putting out three albums.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "FACILE-BATISTE")
MARTIN: "Black Mozart" brings jazz and blues to some of the 18th century Austrian composer's most famous tunes. Two other albums, "Monk Meditations" and "Monk Movements," are inspired by jazz great Thelonious Monk.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BATISTE: We all have this wonderful opportunity to create and share and connect and be inspired. And acting on it and not waiting is a good thing. So I just love the idea of this piano series because it's, for me, a way of processing the world around me through the piano.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BATISTE: If I could be in conversation with these late, great composers, it would be like us sitting around a piano and trading bars and saying, OK, you did this, and what if we took it this way? So it's a great conversation across hundreds of years.
MARTIN: I was wondering what it was like for you as a student wanting to improvise and to question around classical music? I mean, obviously, improvisation has always been a big part of jazz, but classical less so.
BATISTE: Oh, it was rough. Rough in the sense that, you know, I almost didn't make it out of school because every other year, they were trying to kick me out. They were like, what are you doing? Why are you playing the melodica with your band in the subway for people? Also, I would be able to do my assignments a lot of the time without practicing. Someone would play it one time before me as they would do their test, and then I would just listen to them and play it back. There was a lot of misunderstanding of my precocious and questioning posture towards the administration and towards the classics. Why would we make the thing that is the universal language be trapped and boundaried and ismed to death?
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "ALLA TURC MOVEMENT")
MARTIN: Let's get into the albums. Like, your "Black Mozart" album is part of a series. The first one, in 2024, was "Beethoven Blues," where you improvise on works like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. And you added some of your own tunes. It sounds like the seeds of it were actually sown quite a long time ago.
BATISTE: Oh, yeah. Learning European classical music, being a Black kid in Kenner, Louisiana, coming from the Batiste family in New Orleans, playing all different genres of music, learning video game music as a kid and transcribing that. All of that cross-pollination, it's all happening at one time.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "REFLECTIONS")
MARTIN: Tell me about your relationship to Thelonious Monk.
BATISTE: Oh, yeah. These elder Black men in the community who could be touring the world and decided to just stay back home in New Orleans and mentor the next generation, they taught us about everything that eventually I would deepen my understanding of when I moved to New York.
MARTIN: You have two Monk albums, and they're different.
BATISTE: Well, "Movements" is fusing Monk with all the other influences that I love on the piano that make me who I am and ultimately making all of that my own.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BATISTE: "Meditations" is creating the spiritual underpin of his music in an entire album.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "ALWAYS KNOW")
BATISTE: You could meditate to that album. You could chant to that album. You could pray to that album. You could sleep to that album.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "ALWAYS KNOW")
MARTIN: Let me talk about the mechanics of what you're doing here. Let us take the molto allegro movement from Mozart's Symphony No. 40. It's one of only two symphonies Mozart wrote in a minor key.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERLIN PHILHARMONIC AND SIR SIMON RATTLE'S PERFORMANCE OF MOZART'S "SYMPHONY NO. 40 IN G MINOR, K. 550: I. MOLTO ALLEGRO")
MARTIN: You have a couple of different takes on the tune, including a Cuban-influenced one.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: I was just wondering how you're breaking down not just the melody, but also the way the different musical voices interact.
BATISTE: I really just first start with a feeling. And the idea is Mozart's music makes me feel this way. How do I make that a reality in what I play and how I interpret it and how I interpolate it? And maybe that leads to playing the piece and adding my own expression, like a cadenza.
Other times, it is, let me change the rhythm. And this makes me feel like the bamboula rhythm or the Afro Latin clave. Or like "Country Zart," it makes me feel like stride piano and ragtime. Other times, it leads me to say, you know, I need to write my own composition to capture this feeling. I want someone who doesn't know anything about technical music to just be able to catch the feeling and be like, wow, this feels like something that I want to hear over and over and over again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BATISTE: A lot of the musicians I grew up with, they're from the neighborhood and they were self-taught. And it wouldn't be correct, but it would be right.
MARTIN: Oh, interesting.
BATISTE: You'd just be like, whew. So I always try to fuse the soul and the science. So, you know, I think about all that stuff, but I want to stay connected to that feeling and that instinct.
MARTIN: That is Jon Batiste. He has three albums coming out, "Black Mozart," "Monk Meditations" and "Monk Movements." Jon Batiste, thank you so much.
BATISTE: Yes, indeed.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "GOSPEL ANDANTE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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