Jon Batiste
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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. And that is a force that, it ransacks your psyche in a way that I didn't realize the power of creativity as an antidote until then.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And through our shared creativity, there was a lot of light that we created together and apart from each other. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
this incredible renowned writer but she couldn't write so she began to paint and just that practice alone was a a form of transformative healing power and and light that gave me the motivation to be able to leave her because i didn't want to leave her side you mean leave her and go to work Exactly.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And it's funny to say, going to a Grammy ceremony where you're nominated 11 times is work, but it puts things in perspective. But 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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, and I would send them. She would listen to them on loop as she painted. One of them became a song.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
That's in the world called butterfly, but there are dozens of these lullabies. But butterfly started like this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Driving around with your head held high. Butterfly flying home.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Just a little taste of it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Oh, well, you know, there's something about the themes that Beethoven was able to
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
No, no. It's something about the themes he was able to manifest that are all sitting right there. It's pre-written by the divine source or the creator. 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
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
That feeling is connected to the human condition. It is the human condition made into sound. 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
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
either transcend or how we fall into despair and how we then come back up again like a phoenix it just is it's connected to something that's very very fundamental in humanity thank you it's just been absolutely a pleasure and an honor for me so um be well and um i wish you all good things yes indeed thank you and likewise to you and your family thank you so much
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
It's something that brings people together around the piano. 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. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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. And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
I like to call it spontaneous composition, which is this difference between improvisation and spontaneous composition. You frame it in your mind first. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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. He's composing and it's
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
in a two meter, one, two, one, two, which is like a march, and waltzes, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. So if you put the march,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And the waltz together, 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. It's the base rhythm for so many popular styles of music and styles of music since the beginning of rhythm.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
There's polyrhythms. Even in that short theme, you're hearing the two and the three. When you put those together, it creates something that is infectious that whether he was referencing that or not, it's something that's a universal, connective, magnetic truth in music. It's like things that make you cry every time you hear them, things that make you dance every time you hear them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
It's just something in the DNA of that sound.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Penta. You hear that in music all across time. And something about that sound gives you the feeling of the blues already. Now, when Beethoven has this. That right there. That's what we call the blue note.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
The rhythmic underpin of this melody carries so much musical information. It's full of inspiration. 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. I wanted to take those implications and bring them out further.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
I love this when Vince goes... Whoo! That's a deeply existential decision. La-na-na, la-na-na, la-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. And then the blues. Ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, let's see. The other one. Christmas time.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
So let's soak up the day And dance the night away So with all you've got Don't stop I heard there was a secret call
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Yes, that's a piece entitled Don't Stop. It was the final track from my first album, Hollywood Africans.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure every time. Thank you very much for your gift to the world and for who you are. Much love.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Yeah, I associate a lot of... that series, and Vince Guaraldi in general with Christmas. I know he's done a lot more than Christmas music, but that soundtrack, that album really changed me a lot. A lot of that influence comes into my music.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Ooh, that's got a song. God rest ye merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay. Remember Christ the Savior Was born on Christmas Day To save us from all Satan's power When we had gone astray Oh, good tidings of Comfort and joy Comfort and joy Oh, good tidings of Comfort and joy. I love that melody. God rest ye merry gentlemen. It's got a blues thing to it.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
You know that one? That's Greensleeves, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. A child is this who lay to rest, and shepherds watch her sleeping. Similar type of melodies, you know, that sound is so, it reminds me of bells ringing. And in the dead of night on Christmas Eve and just snowfall and there's a majesty to that.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
There's a majesty to that time and that moment for many reasons, obviously, but there's something about that space in time that, you know, certain Christmas music is able to manifest that feeling and that environment into sound. It's able to make it sound.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Oh, yeah, yeah. I like it like that. I don't know.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
That's O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. I grew up with those, too. That's amazing that those songs just have that same sound.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I grew up in the Catholic. My mother, she grew up Baptist, and then we went to Catholic church, but I also would sometimes go to the Baptist church and then eventually the AME church. So I had this experience with mostly Catholic, but then also in New Orleans there's a...
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
a lot of different manifestations of the Roman Catholic tradition is very tied to the culture and to Mardi Gras in ways that, you know, very interesting. But, um, it was, it was beautiful in particular on Christmas where we'd go to midnight mass and we would experience these hymns and people would sing and just have this, this majesty and, um, and, um,
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
This this real allure for me, I actually connected to it most during that time. And I also learned a lot from Bach's music. You know, we talked about Bach in the past and just how Bach is somebody who in history, you know,
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
him and and duke ellington just they they composed so much music but one function of why bach was able to compose that much music besides the fact that he maybe he was an alien is that he he wrote for the church every sunday and that ritual and i imagine at some point
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
I don't know when in my life or when I would have the setup to do that, but I want to participate in some sort of ritual in service to the Creator where I'm composing and sharing that music just like I experienced when I was growing up.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have yourself a merry little Christmas Let your heart be light Next year all our troubles will be out of sight. That one, right?
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
By next year, yes. Wow. Ooh, Terry, you got an ear. You hear that? Terry, that's it. Yeah, troubles will be out of sight. I love that. That lyric has, wow. Wow, that lyric is one of my favorites, actually, now that you mention it. It has a relevance to our time.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
That's the one I was thinking, okay. Someday soon we all will be together If the fates allow Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow So have yourself a merry little Christmas now
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
That's a great one. I'm just remembering these, this beautiful stuff. Do you like O Holy Night? Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the... O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night, our dear, of our dear Savior's birth. At long lay the world in sin and error pining till He appeared... And the soul felt all its worth. That's how it goes, right? Yes. Yeah, I'm trying to remember.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
But that's a different moment. The holy night, the stars are brightly shining. Like this is what I'll do. I'm hearing like the symmetry of both of those melodies. Wow, there's something there. You've given me an idea.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
Yes, yes. What's the part on the bridge? The fall on your knees. That's the other drama part, the fall on your knees, yeah.
Fresh Air
Jon Batiste, Holiday Edition / Questlove Christmas
I'm going to figure it out as I play. Okay.