Late bloomer is what he calls himself. Twelve years old is late, Jon Batiste is saying. Late for a musician to know their calling. Let alone to bloom.
Until that age, Jon had options, thoughts, explorations. Born into a Louisiana family steeped in music, instruments were never far from reach. He picked up drumsticks and percussion and performed with the family band, had his own band by the age of 14. Yet as burgeoning peers embraced their musical calling at 2, 3, and 4 years old and were gig-paid musicians before their teens, Jon was, like many young boys, into “a lot of different things.”
Things that could have easily swayed him away from the family trade. Instead, he was late.
“There were so many different possible pathways for me,” he recalls. “But at about 14, the music just took over.”
Today, it is Batiste, now 37, who seizes. Who seizes music. Seizes notes, chords and melodies with an arsenal of instruments and melds them into sounds that defy categorization, that blend genres and generations into a satisfying dish for all palettes.
He’s garnered five Grammys — including 2022 Album of the Year, “We Are” — an Oscar (“Soul” score), and copious other awards, and shared stages and studios with names that stand atop every genre.
Most recently, he was among myriad collaborators on Beyoncé’s genre-shattering album “Country Carter.” He produced and helped write the song “American Requiem.”
If Quincy Jones, Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder are carved into the Mount Rushmore for genre-busting musicians, sculptors may want to begin studying Jon Batiste’s expressive visage.
We are sitting on steps inside the Ballard House in Birmingham, Ala., an octogenarian cultural space that breathes the city’s vital history. Among its incarnations, it was a doctor’s office, a place where injured civil rights protesters or Black citizens going about their lives came to be treated and healed after attacks by KKK card-carrying police and their awful friends.
Batiste was there for an intimate Sunday suppah hosted by Danella Johnson. They met via her son, Barry Johnson, a Batiste adviser and friend (and the first Black male graduate of The Altamont School), during a birthday trip to New York a few years ago.
Along with his culturally eclectic band and crew (they harken back to Sly & the Family Stone and many other racially mixed groups of that era), the house was filled with a culturally varied intergenerational vibe, befitting the audience drawn to Batiste. There was, too, of course, the satisfying whiff of good, Southern food.
He speaks in a melodic staccato, intentional yet tempered relative to his on-stage persona. In mid-sentence sometimes, his hands and fingers will move as if tickling an invisible melodica. Sounds — some notes, some be-bops — will spring from his lips until words return to complete the thought.
The topic, of course, was music — its power and possibilities, particularly in that historic space and in these discordant times.
“Music,” he began, “in particular, when I think about the forms of music, such as jazz, or these acoustic forms of music when people come together and may not speak the same language, may not come from the same place, but they have to co-create together and really exist and coexist in a way that makes beautiful sounds and beautiful music. There are so many lessons in there, that even if you’re not playing the music or creating the music when you listen to it, it’s therapeutic. It’s mental health.”
Oh, how we need that.
“There’s something about finding music in a dark time,” he said, “that can be cathartic, opening your spirit to release some of the things that you may be holding onto and pulling you down.”
I have a confession: While I’ve heard Batiste’s music, I don’t know Batiste’s music. Couldn’t hum a single lick off a track from “We Are.” That night, it didn’t matter.
“It’s not just entertainment,” ;he shared, on those steps. “It can obviously be entertaining, but it’s the collective wisdom and experiences of all the generations past and all our social practices and rituals — the way that we gather, the way we convene, how we celebrate, how we worship, all of that is in our music.”
We talked about the children, what might happen if we don’t get this right, if we don’t fix this mess, if we don’t endure, and how we prepare them to do better than us. How music, in an age dominated by test scores, may play an invaluable role in melding, blending and preparing them to create, to collaborate, with those who may not speak the same language.
“So, for young people,” Batiste says, “the feeling of the music — not even intellectually understanding it or knowing its history, just feeling the music, the whole lineage, the whole diaspora is important. That’s something I believe as an artist.
“It’s why I don’t separate genres. I bring all the things into one.”
After the release of “Country Carter,” after it crushed the toes of country music, reminded country music of its Black roots, Batiste shared on social media: “This is the moment y’all, where we dismantle the genre machine.”
Back on the steps, he reiterated the opportunity of the moment, the obligation of the moment, and why he’s hellbent on seizing it — on blooming. Late or not.
“You have an opportunity to live for hundreds and hundreds of years,” he says. “And there’s something so important and powerful in the vibrations of music, in the feeling of music. It inspires thoughts, it inspires action.
“It inspires us to really be motivated to go on in our darkest times. It’s the fuel for movements. So, if you write a song, you’re not just doing something that will exist for your lifetime, you’re potentially creating something that will transcend for generations.”
Even for the late bloomers.
Roy Johnson is a columnist for al.com.