Growing up in Louisiana, Jon Batiste barely spoke until he was about 10 years old. Instead, he absorbed and listened closely to everything around him. And there was a ton of material to work with as a member of the storied Batiste musical dynasty that has roots in New Orleans jazz, R&B, funk and brass band.
“With music around me from all different sources, I was like, okay, how do I feel about this?” Batiste said in an interview with Morning Edition host Michel Martin. “Classical music is cool, but what if you took it and you expressed it in this way instead of the way that everybody says you should express it?”
In a trio of new albums, Batiste draws from his early years as a classical piano student and his subsequent jazz studies at Juilliard to share his takes on Mozart and Thelonious Monk.
“This is just an outgrowth of that, just taking the ideas of all this great music — Mozart, Thelonious Monk — and adding to the continuum of it and contributing my own thoughts to it,” he tells Morning Edition host Michel Martin. “It would be like us sitting around the piano and trading bars and saying, ‘Okay, you did this, and what if we took it this way?'”
The albums are part of a series that began with Beethoven Blues in 2024, where he improvised on works like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and added some of his own tunes like “Life of Ludwig.”
In the largely improvisational Black Mozart, which was recorded in just a day, Batiste grabs the melodies from some of the 18th century Austrian composer’s most famous works and spins them off using Black American music traditions like jazz, blues, and folk.
He plays with the melody, harmony and rhythm of Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major (nicknamed Sonata facile), the “alla turca” movement of Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major or even the first movement of Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Sometimes, he creates entirely new pieces.
This omnivorous approach caused friction with traditionalists during Batiste’s student years.
“It was rough,” he recalled. “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?’ There was a lot of misunderstanding of my sort of precocious and questioning posture toward the administration and toward the classics.”
Batiste describes such criticism as “very myopic,” limiting a practice he’d like to see freed up instead.
“It is a very group-think phenomenon that is divisive and it separates us, and that shouldn’t extend to the arts. It shouldn’t extend anywhere. But it’s everywhere, as in our politics as a religion. And I just am like, man, why would we make the thing that is the universal language be trapped and boundaried and ismed to death?”
Batiste recalls first being introduced to Monk by community elders in New Orleans who served as some of his first mentors.
“And then I moved to New York and I started hearing Thelonious Monk’s music at jam sessions and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m trying to be able to play in a way that is very aligned to this music.'”
In Monk Movements, Batiste says he’s expressing the virtuosity of the Black American pianistic tradition, “fusing Monk with all the other influences that I love on the piano that make me who I am.”
Batiste’s joyful, inspired spirit lifts Monk favorites like “In Walks Bud” and “Ugly Beauty,” where his exclamations can be heard while playing the piano. Batiste originally wrote the theme in his own “Red Beans” as a child. The unusual chords, dissonance and disjointed melodies are evocative of Monk, but Batiste has said he wasn’t familiar with him at the time.
A separate album, Monk Meditations, is more contemplative. Those pieces create “the spiritual underpinning” of Monk’s music, Batiste says. “You could meditate to that album, you could chat to that album, you could pray to that album, you could sleep to that album,” he adds. It’s a soundscape that flirts with new age. The lines are often long, the chord progressions clearly delineated.
Batiste hopes anyone from the casual listener to the seasoned musician will feel a connection to his latest compositional frenzy.
“Our understanding of music and our understanding of who we could be and who we actually are has limited us from knowing our history,” Batiste says.
“And all of that is not a negative thing because then it just gives the opportunity for guys like me to come along… You’ve got to have people that are just like, ‘Let me come in, let me carry the torch and spread the depth and the gifts that our ancestors have left us.’ And do it with joy and passion.”
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