The Untold Truth Of Jon Batiste

Ever since he was hired as bandleader for "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," Jon Batiste has become a household name to TV viewers who end their evenings watching the popular late-night show. What casual watchers may not realize, however, is that there's a lot more to Batiste than that; as a People profile pointed out, he's also a multiple Grammy nominee who's recorded numerous albums and collaborated music royalty, including Stevie Wonder, Prince, Willie Nelson, Mavis Staples, Ed Sheeran, and many more.

A native of the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, he once told The New York Times that music is something he holds in the highest regard. "Music has always been a way for people to endure hardship and figure out how to really connect to their humanity or affirm their humanity when everything around them is trying to squash their humanity," he said. 

Despite becoming a ubiquitous presence on late-night television, fans of this wildly talented artist may not know as much about him as they think. Read on to find out even more about the untold truth of Jon Batiste.

Most musicians talented enough to be accepted into New York City's famed Juilliard School will take what they learned in that storied institution and bring it to the stage and the recording studio after graduation. Jon Batiste, went a different route, recording his first album, 2005's "Times in New Orleans," when he was just 17, prior to starting at Juilliard. A review for All About Jazz described the album as "a debut disc that would be excellent even if it were his fourth, fifth or sixth outing," presciently predicting Batiste would "mature as a composer, arranger and performer and continue to develop his own voice."

Moving from the Big Easy to the Big Apple, he told All About Jazz, was a "big shift" for the teenager. "It was like coming to the epicenter of art and culture," Batiste explained. 

While attending Juilliard, Batiste also got to know another New Orleans native, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who served as Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. "I don't know another person in New York who's from Kenner," Batiste said in All About Jazz. "We have that mutual connection. The Batistes and the Marsalises are very big musical families in the New Orleans area. We went to the same schools and had a lot of the same instructors. I met him in New Orleans as a kid, and then when I came to Juilliard, I started to play with him."

Even the most casual fan "The Late Show" has certainly witnessed Jon Batiste's propensity to take familiar songs and reimagine them with bold new arrangements. While he's been particularly fond of doing that with video game music, he's also put his own unique spin on the iconic Civil War-era anthem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." 

That came about when he was approached by The Atlantic in 2017 to record the song for the magazine's podcast, "Atlantic Radio." As Batiste noted, he approached the song with the understanding that it "is a part of American mythology and is a true mashup of cultures." In an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation," Batiste explained that he decided to keep the song's "march tempo" but decided to experiment with other types of marches, such as "the New Orleans second-line march with the bamboula rhythm." As a result, he "took the concept of the march intentionally but filtered it through a few other experiences."

Growing up in New Orleans, he added, led him to gain an appreciation for "the power of two different types of cultures or two different worldviews coming together and not agreeing or coexisting," something he deliberately placed "in the foreground of the arrangement of the 'Battle Hymn.' And you hear that. Those elements blending together. And I think it's beautiful."

Jon Batiste faced a huge learning curve when he was hired as bandleader on "The Late Show," a gig requiring an array of other elements beyond his talent as a musician and performer. To illustrate that, Batiste walked Vox through a typical day behind the scenes of the late-night show. 

"It's a long day," Batiste said, noting that each morning typically kicks off with the show's writers pitching ideas to host Stephen Colbert. By the time Batiste arrives, he'll "start to get a sense, just from what's buzzing around the building, what people are talking about." Based on that, Batiste will then create a list of songs he'll want to play during the show, carefully selected to offer a musical "commentary" on the jokes, and get clearance to perform them on the air. While this is happening, Batiste is also composing new music that he and Stay Human will play during the commercial breaks. 

In addition, Batiste is often enlisted to interact in sketches with Colbert and his guests, referencing a video he made with Dua Lipa in an elevator as an example. "There's a lot of intensity to get it in the can in a couple of takes," he said of how quickly those pieces need to come together. This part of his job has actually unleashed Batiste's inner comedian. Whether it be a musical number about the excuses one could use when they don't want to go out or a nine-step piano tutorial, Batiste sure delivers good content.

One aspect of Jon Batiste's live performances that differentiates him from other performers is his practice of taking his music out on the streets — literally. In an interview with NBC News 4, Batiste explained why he'd come to dub these impromptu street performances "love riots." "There's love that's spread between everybody through the music and it's sort of like a riot because we stop the street," he said.

His intent, Batiste told Interview, is "to take [jazz] outside the context of the concert hall and take it to the street without watering it down. People don't dance to jazz anymore and that's one of the problems," he said. Performing in the street, he told NBC News 4, allows him and Stay Human to bring their music to people who might otherwise not be exposed to it. "It's like a captive audience," he explained.

"They may not have had the ability to see us at Carnegie Hall or something like that so we bring the music to them," Batiste said in an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning." One interesting facet of Batiste's street performances, he told Okay Player, is that not even he knows when they're going to happen. "I'm so spontaneous with the love riots," he said. "A few of our friends and people we know come out, we gather in a spot, and we just kind of let community percolate and see what happens."

During his frequent travels, Jon Batiste told GQ, he has 10 essentials he always brings with him. The first of these is a Polaroid-style instant camera to document the amazing moments he gets to experience. Noting that he's "a gamer through and through," Batiste also carries a portable Super Nintendo Mini video game system with him. He also finds shoe insoles to be "very, very essential," given that his "particularly flat" feet can use the extra support.

He also shared the array of clothing he takes with him when traveling, ranging from comfy sweatpants to stylish stage outfits. He also brings several sets of grills, which feature "actual gold and actual diamonds," purchased at a place recommended to him by rapper A$AP Rocky. Other items he displayed included canned red kidney beans (eating "beans on Monday is a tradition that we can never forsake" in New Orleans, he explained), and some "show day dressing room essentials" including a back roller, manuka honey, throat-coating tea, lozenges, lip balm, and a head wrap.

Batiste also brings a number of books with him, while another essential is his familiar harmoniboard (which, he noted, is also called a melodica or melodyhorn). The 10th and final item in his travel arsenal, he revealed, is his cellphone. While he loves having a smartphone on his person, he told the Wall Street Journal in 2017, "There are days when I wish I could just have a flip phone."

Winning his first Oscar in 2021 for his contribution to the Pixar film "Soul" may have seemed like a pinnacle for Jon Batiste at the time. As it turned out, however, that was just a warmup for what came later that year when the Recording Academy released its nominations for the 2022 Grammy Awards. Batiste received not just one nomination, but 11 of them. This, noted The New York Times, was the largest number of nominations received by any artist that year, which saw him nominated in multiple categories, including Album of the Year in addition to nods in the jazz, R&B, and American roots categories.  

"My goodness, I'm so over the moon," Batiste told the Times of his multiple nominations, eight of which sprang from his album "We Are," with the remaining three for his music in the Pixar film "Soul." "I've always made an effort to show that the genres are all connected, just like people in all of our lineages are connected ... it just feels so great for it to be recognized on music's biggest stage," he added. Being nominated in such a diverse field of categories was vindication of his refusal to be pinned down into any one musical genre. "I don't even think genre exists," he told the Recording Academy in June 2021. Clearly, that mindset has worked rather well.

While the past decade has been a whirlwind for Jon Batiste, he hasn't been experiencing it alone. Joining him on this journey has been his longtime girlfriend, author and journalist Suleika Jaouad. While Batiste has long displayed a tendency to keep his personal life private, he made a rare exception on the song "Show Me the Way" from his album "We Are," which is not only about the couple's relationship but also samples her voice. "It speaks to a lot of me growing up and also our relationship," Batiste told People of that track. "It's a beautiful thing to have that piece of our relationship sliced off into the album."

While quarantining during COVID-19 has led to the end of numerous relationships, Batiste declared that the opposite had proven true in their case, insisting they'd only grown closer while hunkered down together. "Obviously there's so much loss that we've faced individually and collectively," he said of the pandemic, "but I find that this time has also been a blessing in that it gives us a break to be with each other."

Another thing that deepened their bond was Jaouad's cancer diagnosis at age 22, something they faced together (as of 2021, she'd been in remission for several years). Going through that experience, she told Hoda Kotb's "Making Space" podcast, showed her that "Jon is someone who shows up in the difficult moments and who keeps on showing up."