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Episode: Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:44:08

Episode Shownotes

The former band leader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert returns to talk with Terry Gross about his new album, Beethoven Blues. We also talk about his early years, like how he had a reputation at Juilliard for playing his melodica everywhere and breaking into song in class. It

nearly resulted in him getting kicked out. Now he serves on the board.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In this episode of Fresh Air, Jon Batiste reflects on his musical journey from Juilliard to his latest album, Beethoven Blues. He shares how his early improvisational style and passion for music nearly led to his expulsion due to his unconventional use of the melodica. Batiste discusses the influence of his father's musical ambitions and highlights his commitment to supporting non-traditional conservatory students through his board position at Juilliard. He also navigates the challenges of fame amidst his wife's health battles, revealing how creativity acts as a lifeline during tough times.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
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00:00:19 Speaker_07
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. It's always a joy when John Batiste joins us at the piano, and that's how I felt about the session we recorded last week with him at the piano.

00:00:30 Speaker_07
Batiste was the band leader and music director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from its premiere in 2015 until 2022.

00:00:38 Speaker_07
That same year, his album called We Are received 11 Grammy nominations in seven different categories and won five Grammys, including Album of the Year. He wrote the score for this year's film, Saturday Night, about the first SNL broadcast.

00:00:55 Speaker_07
He also appears in the film as musician Billy Preston, the first musical guest. Batiste is a jazz musician who also studied classical music at Juilliard, where he got his B.A. and M.A. and is now on the board.

00:01:08 Speaker_07
But his music is more expansive than jazz and classical, as you can tell just by the varied Grammy categories in which he's been nominated for or won awards.

00:01:17 Speaker_07
Jazz Performance, American Roots Song, Contemporary Classical Composition, Jazz Instrumental, R&B Album, Improvised Jazz Solo, Pop Duo or Group Performance, and Original Score for the animated film, Soul.

00:01:33 Speaker_07
He currently has two Grammy nominations, Best Music Film and Best Song Written for Visual Media, for the documentary American Symphony. The film is about composing his American Symphony and performing the premiere in Carnegie Hall.

00:01:48 Speaker_07
The film also developed into something totally unexpected. A document of the period his wife, Sulayka Jawad, was diagnosed with a recurrence of leukemia, which had been in remission for over 10 years.

00:02:01 Speaker_07
The first and second occurrences required bone marrow transplants, which necessitates brutal doses of chemo. We'll talk about what that period was like for him a little later. The occasion for his appearance today is his new album, Beethoven Blues.

00:02:18 Speaker_07
It features his reimaginings of Beethoven compositions. Since we're fortunate to have him at the piano, he'll play some of the music from that album and more. John Battiste, welcome back to Fresh Air. I love your new album.

00:02:32 Speaker_07
The documentary about you and your wife's bone marrow transplant was like really moving. And so it's a pleasure to have you back on our show. And how is she?

00:02:44 Speaker_06
She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.

00:02:49 Speaker_07
She sounds that way from the documentary, and I'm very glad to hear that. So I want to start with some music, and you are at the piano, so you will be playing it for us. And the lead track of your Beethoven Blues album is for Elise.

00:03:04 Speaker_07
And I think anyone who's taken piano lessons with any amount of classical music has had to learn this. And you do some really fascinating things with it. Why is that the lead track of the album?

00:03:16 Speaker_06
It's something that brings people together around the piano.

00:03:19 Speaker_06
It's that thing that if you're at a party and you had a piano lesson once or twice in your life and you're having fun that night, you might go and play or somebody plays it and it's just so ubiquitous.

00:03:31 Speaker_06
It connects to something that is rare for us to have all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that.

00:03:39 Speaker_07
Yeah. And you learned it as a kid?

00:03:41 Speaker_06
I learned as a kid, you know, one of the first things that I learned, and then I had this habit, which as evidenced by this album, I still do, of being in conversation with the composer.

00:03:52 Speaker_06
And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.

00:04:01 Speaker_07
So before you play it, I want to ask you, are you going to play it like you played it on the album? Because my understanding is you did a lot of improvising in real time for that recording. Or are you going to do different things with it now?

00:04:12 Speaker_06
I like to call it spontaneous composition, which is this difference between improvisation and spontaneous composition. You frame it in your mind first.

00:04:22 Speaker_06
You map it out and you create a form, and then you allow for surprise, but you're really just executing on this thing that you composed before sitting at the piano. And it can be different every time.

00:04:35 Speaker_06
So this has a bit of a structure that is on the album, but every time I play it, it's going to be different.

00:04:42 Speaker_07
OK, let's hear it. You're at the piano. Can you play it?

00:04:45 Speaker_06
Of course.

00:07:04 Speaker_07
That was great. That's John Batiste at the piano at the studio of WNYC. And it's also the lead Beethoven tune on his new album, Beethoven Blues. And John, that sounded great.

00:07:19 Speaker_07
You know, you mentioned in, I think, your official statement about the album that you think Beethoven is really kind of connected to the blues, even though he's centuries before the blues.

00:07:33 Speaker_07
Can you just like illustrate what you mean by that, like play some passage of Beethoven that makes you think of the blues?

00:07:41 Speaker_06
Well, when you think about the blues and Beethoven's music, his music was actually deeply African, you know, rhythmically. There was this thing that's happening in his music that I really love where he's playing in two different times at once.

00:07:55 Speaker_06
He's composing and it's, in a 2 meter, 1, 2, 1, 2, which is like a march. And waltzes, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. So if you put the march and the waltz together.

00:08:13 Speaker_06
You get a two against three, an odd against an even, which is the West African rhythm, the 6-8 rhythm that comes from Africa that leads to the American shuffle rhythm, which is the clave of the blues, if you will.

00:08:26 Speaker_06
It's the bass rhythm for so many popular styles of music and styles of music since the beginning of rhythm.

00:08:33 Speaker_07
Play what you mean.

00:08:34 Speaker_06
This polyrhythm

00:08:41 Speaker_06
bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah

00:09:11 Speaker_07
Don't you find it interesting that there are certain like harmonies, chords, rhythms that it took centuries or millennia to get to? You know, like jazz chords, gospel chords, like they weren't, quote, invented yet in Beethoven's time.

00:09:27 Speaker_06
Well, that's the beauty of this project that I find the artists of today has this golden opportunity. You can connect dots that were never connected before. Blues was a feeling since the beginning of time.

00:09:40 Speaker_06
You hear it in the pentatonic scale, one of the most ubiquitous scales in music. This scale, five notes. Penta. You hear that in music all across time and something about that sound gives you the feeling of the blues already.

00:09:59 Speaker_06
Now, when Beethoven has this. That right there.

00:10:07 Speaker_06
That's what we call the blue note, and that hadn't been invented, that hadn't been codified yet, but when I heard that in this piece as a kid, it immediately made me think about the blues that I was learning downtown from my classical lessons.

00:10:21 Speaker_06
So I would think about, okay, well... The blues scale that we all learn when we're children is the pentatonic scale with that added blue note.

00:10:42 Speaker_06
Now that's just one very small example of perhaps the idea that Beethoven, if he were around in the 21st century today, he probably would take these sounds, most likely would incorporate them in the music that he'd be composing today, which is a very exciting proposition.

00:11:00 Speaker_07
So there's another Beethoven symphony excerpt that I'd like you to play for us, if you will. And it's from a Symphony No. 5, which, again, is something like everybody knows. It's da-da-da-dum, that one.

00:11:17 Speaker_06
Yes, yes.

00:11:19 Speaker_07
So what do you hear in this that made you want to, like, reimagine it, improvise on it?

00:11:28 Speaker_06
The rhythmic underpin of this melody carries so much musical information. It's full of inspiration.

00:11:35 Speaker_06
And that rhythm, that two and the three, that sound of the polyrhythm that is of the African diaspora that continues through all these different forms of music. I heard it and I just wanted to bring it out.

00:11:47 Speaker_06
I wanted to take those implications and bring them out further. So it was a beautiful thing to hear it first as And then think about...

00:12:31 Speaker_10
do do do do do

00:13:36 Speaker_07
Yeah. Love it. You went to Juilliard. So in addition to studying classical music in New Orleans when you were young, you went to Juilliard, I think you were 17. And you didn't know how to sight read when you got there.

00:13:49 Speaker_07
At a certain point, maybe junior year, was it that you were told to take a year off or get kicked out?

00:13:54 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's right.

00:13:56 Speaker_07
So what, what was their problem with you? Well, you know, I had... Was it that you were doing all this stuff to the classics? You know, that... Did you demonstrate the problem just now?

00:14:07 Speaker_06
I mean, I may have. One of the things, I had this instrument, you know... You brought your melodica with you. Yes, I have my melodica everywhere I go. I did in those days, at least. It's like a harmonica and a keyboard put together.

00:14:24 Speaker_06
I would carry it around school all the time. And you know, I was just a very, very ambitious, precocious teenager in New York from Louisiana in the big city now. And the world literally was my oyster, I felt like.

00:14:38 Speaker_06
I would go out and put bands together and sometimes I'd even put acting troops together and I would combine the divisions to do projects that I'd dream up where I'd get dancers and actors and musicians and we would go down into the subways and we'd play for folks.

00:14:55 Speaker_06
I just don't think at that time they could understand the bigger vision that I saw in my head. So, you know, things started to get to a point where they felt I wasn't focused enough, I guess.

00:15:10 Speaker_07
So you've said that you were told to stop playing melodica, and that's what got you sent to a psychiatrist.

00:15:18 Speaker_07
I wasn't sure what that meant, whether they told you you needed to go to a psychiatrist or you decided to go to a psychiatrist, and what was the reason for that?

00:15:28 Speaker_06
Well, you know, I had a fairly easy time with some of the assignments that would, you know, I guess take some others a longer period of time to master and I would basically sometimes sit in class and this time I'd be there and hearing music in my head and I'd sing out loud and

00:15:51 Speaker_06
These are just things that I didn't really know I was doing as part of this world that I was living in, I guess, as a defense mechanism.

00:15:59 Speaker_06
I'd hear music and I'd sing out loud in the middle of class and then they would think, well, what's wrong with this guy? And he's got this melodica that he's carrying around and he's doing all of these zany projects.

00:16:10 Speaker_06
He's really unique, to say the least. And at one point, one of my teachers had a conversation with the dean, and then there was a whole thing where everybody kind of co-signed this notion that maybe he should see someone.

00:16:28 Speaker_06
Maybe there's something up with this kid. He needs to go. And so I sat down. and I had an evaluation with the counseling department at Juilliard and it was a beautiful exchange that I didn't really see as an evaluation or any sort of problem.

00:16:48 Speaker_06
It just was a conversation for a long time that led to the conclusion that I didn't have any issues other than that

00:16:57 Speaker_06
And I mean, I'm still humbled to hear, but he says this guy is a genius the likes of Charlie Parker, which we haven't seen here and we're lucky to have.

00:17:09 Speaker_07
That was your diagnosis? Genius like Charlie Parker?

00:17:13 Speaker_06
Yeah. I mean, that's what they said. I don't know if I believe that, but that's what Then they kind of left me alone until junior year, a little bit.

00:17:22 Speaker_06
They didn't really leave me alone, but until junior year, I got to the point where the things I was doing outside of school, I was touring and I was playing shows and I was coming in and I was doing the work, but I also was not following the pattern of the ideal student.

00:17:40 Speaker_06
And it became a question of, my ambition going to pull me out of school before they kick me out of school. And they wanted me to make the choice.

00:17:55 Speaker_07
Why did you go back after the year?

00:17:57 Speaker_06
My mother, she's, you know, the reason I play the piano, she's the one who's kind of always there to see me through if I have a question about, you know, this is something that I believe in, but doesn't seem like it's clicking.

00:18:11 Speaker_06
She was like, you know, you got to think with your own mind. Nobody has

00:18:15 Speaker_06
Anything that they know that is more than you, you respect people and you learn from folks, but if you know something, then you know it and believe it and follow through and don't quit.

00:18:27 Speaker_06
So she just told me all of these different ways of affirming the things I believed about music and the ways that I wanted to approach giving that to the world and uplifting folks and healing folks.

00:18:39 Speaker_06
And you know, my dad is my first musical mentor, and he's someone who, through his experience playing on the Chitlin circuit, doing all these incredible performances from, you know, the likes of Isaac Hayes, and I remember they played the same bill as the Jackson 5 at one point early on, and just his stories of

00:18:59 Speaker_06
you know, traveling. He'd always wished that he could go to a school like Juilliard and do something like that. So, you know, it's for the legacy of my family.

00:19:07 Speaker_06
And, I mean, now fast forward a decade later, I'm on the board and I'm helping to change the place for folks who come in there like me, who are maybe not the typical conservatory musician student.

00:19:26 Speaker_07
Joining us at the piano is John Batiste. After a break, he'll play more music for us and talk about two years ago, the year he won multiple Grammys, but at the same time, his wife had a recurrence of leukemia requiring a bone marrow transplant.

00:19:42 Speaker_07
I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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00:21:03 Speaker_07
Hi, this is Mollie C.V. Nusper, digital producer at Fresh Air. And this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter. And I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast.

00:21:15 Speaker_07
The newsletter includes all the week's shows, staff recommendations, and Mollie picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read. It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week in exclusive.

00:21:26 Speaker_07
So subscribe at whyy.org slash fresh air and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning. There was one piece, I think it was the Brahms Ballade No. Do you say ballad or ballad? Ballade. Ballade, yeah. So it's the Brahms Ballade No.

00:21:45 Speaker_07
You spent one year studying that one piece. Yes. And you kept, I assume, kept hearing new things in it. And can you play an example of how you originally heard it and how

00:22:03 Speaker_07
You heard nuances that you didn't hear before and played it differently than you did before after working with your teacher.

00:22:10 Speaker_06
Oh, yeah. This is one of the things I love the most. So I'll just start with the first chord. It's D minor. All intensive purpose is D minor, OK?

00:22:23 Speaker_06
So now I'm going to voice this chord with the same notes, but it's going to sound completely different based upon what voices I bring out. Now, this is one element of a world of nuance that I learned from my mentor, William Dogleian.

00:22:42 Speaker_06
Now, pressing the key, all of your sound comes from this very inside baseball. All of your sound comes from the first joint of your finger. So these are different sounds that you can get just using that first joint.

00:23:28 Speaker_07
You know, like sometimes you see at the piano somebody playing and their hands are rising and their hands are, you know, it's all very dramatic the way their hands are.

00:23:37 Speaker_07
And I'm never sure whether that's showmanship or if it makes a difference sonically or rhythmically. You know what I mean?

00:23:44 Speaker_06
Well, there's certain aspects of it that are for show and certain aspects of it that are real. You know, there's a beauty in developing your own technique at the instrument. You know, I learned a lot from William and

00:23:56 Speaker_06
I learned a lot from Monk, and I learned a lot from a lot of the different pianists that I grew up listening to in New Orleans, and you develop your own pedagogy. You know, I like to play with rings on.

00:24:07 Speaker_06
There's something about the equilibrium of my hand that when I have a pinky ring on, it really establishes a certain sort of attack and balance, and there's a certain ictus to the sound that I like.

00:24:20 Speaker_07
So that chord that you played for us in the Brahms, put that in context, like play the whole sentence, if you know what I mean?

00:24:27 Speaker_06
Absolutely. peaceful of nuance.

00:24:52 Speaker_07
We'll hear more with John Batiste after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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00:25:53 Speaker_07
You were the music director and band leader at The Late Night with Stephen Colbert from its inception in 2015 until 2022.

00:26:02 Speaker_07
Toward the end of that period, which is also the period that you were nominated for a record number of Grammys in different categories and you won five Grammys until including album of the year. Your now wife, Sulayka Juwad, was, she was very sick.

00:26:19 Speaker_07
She had had a recurrence of leukemia that she'd had about 11 years before that. And she needed a bone marrow transplant, her second one, because she had one during the first occurrence. And those are just awful.

00:26:31 Speaker_07
I mean, basically they give you this very, very heavy-duty chemo that nearly kills you. It kills your immune system so that you don't fight the transplant. But a lot of people come within an inch of death and then have to recover.

00:26:50 Speaker_07
And your immune system's shot, so you can't be around anything or any body that might expose you to any kind of germ. What was it like for you to be living in two worlds at once? You're getting all these accolades. You're performing on the Grammys.

00:27:06 Speaker_07
You're still at Late Night with Stephen Colbert. People are seeing you every night. You have a reputation of joy, of bringing joy to where you are. And meanwhile, your wife is really suffering. I'm sure you are suffering just, you know, watching her.

00:27:24 Speaker_07
What was it like to have two worlds at the same time?

00:27:28 Speaker_06
There's a deep sense of connectivity that you have with your soulmate, whether you meet somebody who just gets you, you look them in the eye and they see you and you see them, and then you come inches away from the veil, you almost lose that person.

00:27:53 Speaker_06
And that's in the back of your mind when you're doing everything, when you're on television, when you're accepting an award that everyone in the world is telling you you should want more than anything else.

00:28:07 Speaker_06
And that is a force that ransacks your psyche in a way that I didn't realize the power of creativity as an antidote until then. And through our shared creativity, there was a lot of light that we created together and apart from each other.

00:28:34 Speaker_06
I sent her lullabies. She would paint, as you see in the documentary. She couldn't write. Her vision was blurred from all the medication. this incredible renowned writer, but she couldn't write, so she began to paint.

00:28:47 Speaker_06
And just that practice alone was a form of transformative healing power and light that gave me the motivation to be able to leave her, because I didn't want to leave her aside.

00:29:04 Speaker_07
I mean, leave her and go to work.

00:29:05 Speaker_06
Exactly. To go and, and, you know, it's funny to say, going to a Grammy ceremony where you're nominated 11 times is work, but it puts things in perspective.

00:29:16 Speaker_06
But, um, for me at that time, creativity was the power that allowed for us to stay connected and for me to have the will to go out and do all the things that you saw me doing at that time.

00:29:31 Speaker_07
Can you play one of the lullabies that you sent her?

00:29:35 Speaker_06
Oh, wow. Yeah, so. These were originals, and they were just as the paper. They were daily. I would send them, and she would have her laptop playing these lullabies that I would send. I would record them on Logic, which is a software program on a laptop.

00:30:00 Speaker_06
And I would send them, and she would listen to them on loop as she painted. One of them became a song. that's in the world called Butterfly, but there are dozens of these lullabies. But Butterfly started like this.

00:30:34 Speaker_04
Butterfly flying home But can you fly on your own? Take your place in the world today Butterfly flying home

00:31:02 Speaker_04
Cherry plum and chewing gum Mini skirts and cars at home Driving round with your head held high Butterfly flying home This is a little taste of it

00:31:31 Speaker_07
That was beautiful, John.

00:31:33 Speaker_06
Thank you.

00:31:34 Speaker_07
You know, the beginning, getting back to Beethoven, the beginning of that reminded me of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

00:31:42 Speaker_06
Oh, well, you know, there's something about the themes that Beethoven was able to

00:31:50 Speaker_07
Am I crazy for saying that, by the way?

00:31:52 Speaker_06
No, no. It's something about the themes he was able to manifest that are all sitting right there. You know, it's pre-written by the divine source or the creator.

00:32:02 Speaker_06
It's just sitting there in the divine stream of consciousness, waiting for someone to pull it down. And he was a vessel for so many of those things that we all feel and we all want to hear, but nobody had played yet. Just that theme of thinking about

00:32:19 Speaker_06
a minor chord, you know? And the second inversion was... Just that idea is so simple, it seems like it would be right under our nose, but the way he was able to pull it down for all time is what's exciting for me about his music in general.

00:32:42 Speaker_06
It has all these things that are so universal, so hardwired into our mainframe, and when you hear it, Now that to me sounds like blues. That feeling is connected to the human condition. It is the human condition made into sound.

00:33:37 Speaker_06
It's something about his music that is always reflective of our collective state and how we deal with our internal world and how we either transcend or how we fall into despair and how we then come back up again like a phoenix.

00:33:54 Speaker_06
It just is connected to something that's very, very fundamental in humanity.

00:34:00 Speaker_07
So in what you just played, the right hand is beautiful. The left hand is stormy. It's dissonant. It's such a contrast to the right hand. And one of the things that attracts me to Beethoven is the storminess of a lot of his music, the darkness of it.

00:34:21 Speaker_07
Were you particularly thinking of Beethoven when your wife was sick, because it was both beautiful but stormy, but dark and dissonant and a little, you know, there seems to be like a warning in some of that music.

00:34:36 Speaker_06
Right, it's very foreboding, it has that sense.

00:34:38 Speaker_07
Foreboding, that is the word, thank you.

00:34:40 Speaker_06
No, no, it really I speak about his music in that way because it's not that I was thinking about him directly or his music.

00:34:51 Speaker_06
It's more that his music represents something that is bigger than him in the way that all of that one percentile of greats, their work represents this thing that is a universal idea that no one had pulled down from the divine subconscious yet.

00:35:10 Speaker_07
Are you going to be bringing more of the pain that you experienced during that period into your public persona and your performances? because you're always equated with joy and love. You gave this phenomenal performance at the Grammys.

00:35:27 Speaker_07
You were such a great dancer and you were surrounded by great dancers. It was just really, like I said, so joyful.

00:35:38 Speaker_07
At the same time, there was so much suffering going on in the background of your life or the foreground of your life, I should say, really.

00:35:45 Speaker_07
So, will you be bringing more of that into your public persona and be more identified with, you know, the darker part of life as well as the joyful part?

00:35:55 Speaker_06
Well, there's a couple things there. I think that I'm associated with joy because I do it to a level that is hard to come by. I do it well, and it's not something that you see often.

00:36:12 Speaker_06
In particular, when you think of performers who are in the mainstream, there's this sense of joy that I bring that is very, very singular.

00:36:25 Speaker_06
And I enjoy that and I think it's very important to have joy in your expression, in the expression of black American artists and artists across all cultures. But I also think that there's always been this

00:36:41 Speaker_06
this underpin in my music that's coming from struggle and coming from many things that, you know, maybe transmute into joy later, but don't start that way.

00:36:54 Speaker_06
And I think there's a lot of reasons why the choice to latch on to the joyous aspects of what I presented, me to continue to deliver that to the people as an antidote to the times that we're in.

00:37:12 Speaker_07
My guest is John Batiste. He's joining us at the piano. His new solo album is called Beethoven Blues. We'll talk more after a break. This is Fresh Air.

00:37:24 Speaker_07
So at the same time that your wife was getting the bone marrow transplant, you were also writing, composing your American Symphony. And the theme of that is featured on your album, Beethoven Blues.

00:37:39 Speaker_07
This was a piece where you wanted to bring together influences of all different kinds of music and not just have classical music in one category and jazz in another, but bring together all forms of American music.

00:37:50 Speaker_07
So there's classical, there's influences of gospel and other black musics, indigenous music, folk music, classical music, and you had, you know, different types of musicians performing.

00:38:02 Speaker_07
Can you play the theme, which is also featured on your album, Beethoven Blues?

00:38:09 Speaker_06
Yes.

00:38:10 Speaker_07
And if you're just joining us, Jean Baptiste is at the piano. It's really beautiful. What did you want to express with that?

00:38:53 Speaker_06
That's one example of something that certainly leads to joy but comes from deep, deep pain and unresolved

00:39:06 Speaker_06
duress that our country is founded upon and many of the things that we are in debate around and the culture clashes of our time and the shift that is occurring right before our eyes in our time and really just thinking about

00:39:28 Speaker_06
a theme that cuts through all that and really speaks to it at the same time, this melody. It could be a chant, it could be a prayer, it can be a hymn, it can be a war cry. It's a theme that is using the pentatonic

00:39:53 Speaker_06
which is the scale that I mentioned earlier that has this sort of connection to so many of the cultures around the world.

00:40:01 Speaker_06
And I knew I wanted to have a sound that if I had the indigenous musicians sing it or if I had the kora players play it or if I had the slide guitar play it or if I had the violin section play it or whatever way that I wanted to orchestrate that theme, it would

00:40:20 Speaker_06
communicate a different layer of the story, a different part of this experience. And you hear this throughout the symphony. It's a traveler's theme as well. It's moving. You know, every time we perform it, I don't imagine it being the same.

00:41:05 Speaker_06
I imagine it being something that molds and shifts and evolves with the ensemble and who's joining the orchestra, and the orchestra being something that is constantly evolving. It's not just a symphony orchestra, it's orchestra plus.

00:41:22 Speaker_06
Putting this theme on the Beethoven album was something that is an ode to Beethoven and the tradition of how he transformed the symphonic tradition and brought in all of the different sounds that he brought in and the rhythmic concepts that we talked about in the melodic.

00:41:37 Speaker_06
ubiquity of all these themes that we know and love.

00:41:40 Speaker_06
And just thinking about this, my first symphony, American Symphony, being in that tradition and in a tradition of the greats who are maybe unsung, who also wrote in connection to the American experience.

00:41:54 Speaker_06
William Grant Still, James Reese Europe, Florence Price, all the composers who are speaking to this over time. It's just something that is very important to me.

00:42:07 Speaker_07
The night of the premiere at Carnegie Hall, the power went out during the performance. Did you see that as like an omen or a sign of something?

00:42:19 Speaker_06
Yes, it was a sign because We were doing something that needed to be done. Every time you do something that you're supposed to be doing, you're going to face some form of attack, some form of pushback.

00:42:36 Speaker_06
And this is the first time in the history of the hall, of Carnegie Hall, that that's happened. You know, things like that will happen. And that's how you know you're doing the thing that you need to be doing.

00:42:49 Speaker_07
When the power came back and the performance continued, were you in a different musical state of mind than you'd been in before?

00:42:56 Speaker_06
Oh my goodness. It's funny because I looked up in the balcony in the audience and I looked down at the folks that were right near the stage and I could look in people's eyes and I could see nobody really knew

00:43:09 Speaker_06
They could sense maybe something was happening, but the majority of folks didn't know that the power went out, because it was only on stage.

00:43:16 Speaker_06
So this is a moment where we're cueing the orchestra through the analog synths and the modular synthesizers, but they can't cue the orchestra because the power's out.

00:43:26 Speaker_06
So no one on stage, you have all these, you know, over a hundred musicians sitting there looking to me for direction. No one knows what to do. So what I thought at that moment, was, okay, I'll play.

00:43:40 Speaker_06
And I improvised, uh, you know, maybe a, um, it was, it was a true spontaneous composition that bridged to the movement that we were just about to start. It bridged to it without knowing how long I need to create this, this interlude, this bridge.

00:44:00 Speaker_06
I did it just the piano alone, which was completely acoustic. And then the orchestra comes in. No one knows that we had this complete disastrous mishap, but I was already in this mindset where nothing is going to stop me.

00:44:16 Speaker_06
And that's probably why I was able to play the thing that I played and not skip a beat, because there was just this series of constant pushback from the time we decided to do this piece, coupled with the fact that it's just a complete unknown whether or not Sulaiqo was going to make it.

00:44:35 Speaker_06
There was all this hoopla around my career and these incredible milestones that we worked so hard for. And then this ability to just now, after it all, come on stage and play this piece. Nothing was going to stop that.

00:44:53 Speaker_07
Thank you. It's just been absolutely a pleasure and an honor for me. So be well, and I wish you all good things.

00:45:02 Speaker_05
Yes, indeed. Thank you, and likewise to you and your family.

00:45:05 Speaker_07
Thank you so much. John Batiste's new solo piano album is called Beethoven Blues. He joined us from public radio station WNYC in New York, where he was recorded by George Wellington. Special thanks to Aaron Cohn and WNYC.

00:45:22 Speaker_07
There's a part two of that interview with John Batiste at the piano in which he talks about and plays and sings some of his favorite Christmas songs and a couple of mine. We'll play that Christmas week on Monday, December 23rd.

00:45:35 Speaker_07
I think you'd really enjoy it. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Danielle Dedweiler. She stars in the new Netflix film adaptation of August Wilson's play, The Piano Lesson.

00:45:48 Speaker_07
She'll talk about her craft, her choices to portray historical figures like Emmett Till's mother, and what it was like to work with Denzel Washington and his family to bring The Piano Lesson to the screen. I hope you join us.

00:46:08 Speaker_07
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

00:46:14 Speaker_07
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers, Ann Reboldinato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakunde, and Anna Baumann.

00:46:26 Speaker_07
Our digital media producers are Molly Seavey-Nesper and Sabrina Seaworth. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Tariq Ross.

00:46:40 Speaker_03
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00:47:10 Speaker_00
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00:47:13 Speaker_00
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