Social Music

A note from the road about the contradictions of Jon Batiste

Jon Batiste in glory, at the 2023 Newport Jazz Festival. (Jonathan Chimene)

Hey there! Hope you’re doing well. 

It’s been a minute, and there’s a lot going on. So I wanted to send a quick note with some timely updates. I’m typing this with thumbs on my phone, masked, from a middle seat on a flight to Los Angeles. So I’m just going to jump right in.

Jon Batiste has a new album out called World Music Radio, and if you’ve been able to avoid any promotion of this fact, your feeds have a lot more chill than mine. For NPR Music, I wrote about the album and a flustering disconnect between Batiste’s wild charisma as a live artist and the vacuous gleam of his recent work on record.

I pitched this piece before I heard World Music Radio, knowing only that it would be Batiste’s first full-length release since winning Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2022 — and that he would be headlining the Newport Jazz Festival on the same day that Louis Cato, his bandleading successor at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, was making his festival debut. Cato released his own studio album this month, one week before Batiste’s. The whole situation seemed ripe for some firsthand critical appraisal.

Again, you’ll find all of that in the piece, so I won’t get into it here. But I will say a bit more about Batiste’s stellar performance at Newport Jazz, which assumed a different shape and tone than his set at Newport Folk one week prior. I wasn’t at the Folk Festival this year, but sources online, including Batiste’s own Instagram, indicate that he went all in on the down-home flavor — featuring Native Soul on a new song, “Rain Dance,” for instance, and cooking ribs with a barrel smoker onstage.

Batiste is known for his spontaneous ignition as a performer, but the man also knows how to prepare. For the Newport Jazz Fest, he assembled an old-fashioned big band — complete with tuxedo uniforms, matching music stands, the whole nine — and created (or commissioned) spirited arrangements of old and new tunes. He led this band with bouncy, arm-waving gusto, like an elastic Cab Calloway.

The enthusiasm was contagious. And it fostered a warm reception for some of the smart, rangy solos by the members of his musical entourage, including young comets like Summer Camargo, playing a plunger-muted trumpet, and Mariel Bildstein, on a blaring trombone. (The best of these moments came on a tune called “The Hawk.” Here’s a taste, from Bildstein’s Insta.)

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Mariel Bildsten on Instagram: “It was such an honor to play with @jonbatiste and his big band! He is such a warm, genius, and incredible musician and bandleader, who had the audience in the palm of his hand for the entire show. It was so special to witness and be a part of it!”

August 22, 2023

Point is, Batiste thought carefully about what kind of presentation he wanted to bring to the world’s most symbolically resonant jazz festival, and how he could lift up others in the process. He didn’t need to bring this same spirit to World Music Radio for the album to be an artistic success. He could have made whatever kind of album he wanted, including one that scans unrepentantly as “pop,” and if it worked, it worked.

But what does it say, about his aspirations and intentions, that the album’s only instrumentalist with a featured credit is Kenny G? I think it actually says a lot. 

Shout Chorus

• I’ve been talking about the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, and have to acknowledge a major loss: Bob Jones, a legendary producer who joined George Wein’s team almost at the start, died last week after a noble struggle with a rare neurological disorder. I’m so glad to see his obit in the NYT, and grateful to have been able to contribute a quote. My deepest condolences to his family.

• The title of this post, “Social Music,” is an allusion to a term that Jon Batiste used a lot during his rise to cultural ubiquity. In early 2016, around the time of his Late Show appointment, I wrote a profile for JazzTimes that considered this phrase, and took the measure of Batiste’s performances on both Jazz and Folk festivals at Newport. Paid subscribers to The Gig can scroll down to read that piece, which is otherwise behind a paywall at the new JazzTimes, and… uh, yikes.

• By happenstance, I was walking behind the main stage at Fort Adams just as Batiste was about to go on. Through a gap in the backdrop, I snapped this image.

• Finally, why am I in Los Angeles? So glad you asked. Tomorrow night, I’ll be at the Hollywood Bowl for Herbie Hancock Celebrates Wayne Shorter, an event for which the phrase “all-star” seems grossly insufficient. My friend and colleague Michelle Mercer will be there too, and I look forward to sharing her thoughts with you. For now, I encourage you to read her recent post about the doc film Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity, which is coming to Amazon Prime this Friday.

  Cutting Room Floor: Behind the Scenes of the New Wayne Shorter Documentary

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