Jon Batiste

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond. Today on the show, we're talking to John Batiste, someone who I absolutely love for bringing jazz back to Late Night. From the days of Doc seven Sin on Carson to Branford Marsalis on Leno, Late Night was one of the last places keeping jazz alive in households across the country. Of course, it would be John Batiste to bring that tradition back. Batiste is an overachiever. As a kid, he was a state champion basketball player and a chess champion. And then when he turned his attention to music at age fourteen, after picking up drums then switching to piano, he started a band with fellow New Orleans musician Trombone Shorty, and that still wasn't enough. He had to then go to Juilliard. Today, Batiste is the band leader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and an Oscar winning composer for the Pick Sorry animated movie Soul. He also received the highest number of Grammy nominations this year, with eleven, including Album of the Year for his most recent release, We Are Let's listen to a bit of the song Cry from that album, which expertly blends a number of genres. John considers we are his best work yet. As you can tell from that clip, it's an accessible mix of jazz, blues, soul, and hip hop. Batisse talks with Bruce Headlam today about what it was like coming up in legendary Nola barrooms. He also talks about setting up a piano in the midst of Brooklyn protests after George Floyd's murder, and he talks about what it meant to have Obama call him personally after hearing his new album, This is Broken raping liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richard. Here's Bruce Headlam with John Batiste. Let's start by talking about year album which came out last year and it's been nominated for a million Grammys. You're gonna be one of those guys at the end of your career who has like one hundred and seventy Grammys, right, my goodness. Well, you know, I make music and I just keep my head down and work on the craft. And this is incredible because think about the process this year for the Grammys, how transparent it's become, and this year they're really pushing for it to be peer voted without so many committees, and to have everybody who's an expert in their field nominate me in their field, you know, classical folk. I don't know what to say. It's just an honor beyond words, and I'm very humbled by the nominations. You know, one thing about this album, like listening to it with your other albums, is this is such a rhythmic album. Did you write it differently? Were you writing it at the piano or did you start with rhythm for some of these songs. Well, I think that I'm just getting more and more in tune with my artist trip, and I feel like I'm just getting started, feel like I'm getting better. I don't know why. There's this mentality that artists as they get older, you know, they peak and then at some point they can't find the rhythm again. And maybe that would be true for me. But I feel like this album is my first album. It's almost as if I'm a late bloomer in that way. I started music and recording when I was sixteen seventeen, but you know, this feels like my first album in the sense of me getting my game in my package together. You did start as a drummer, is that right. Yeah, I started as a drummer. I dabbled on piano, but I was not a pianist by definition. Now, a lot of pianist I've talked to really started at as drummers. They say it had a big effect on their piano playing. Did being a drummer affect how you approached the piano? Everything is everything. You get a sense of connectivity between all types of activities that you do, especially at that age. You know, I'm thinking about when I was eleven. I don't think there's anything that directly impacted the next thing, but it all affected everything. I didn't actively become a musician or a music listener until I was about fifteen or sixteen. Everything before that point was acquired through osmosis. I had so many different experiences from my dad being a musician and my uncle's plan in the blues and Chitland circuit of the Southeast United States, and then Plan you know folks like Jackie Wilson, Isaac Hayes, King, Floyd Lloyd Price, blues singers, folks singers, soul singers of the black idiom of that time. Then you have my sister who's listening to cash money records and the Hot Boys and Alanis Moore set on cassette tape, my cousins who are advanced music producers at this time, producing making beats, rapping. You know. I was studying classical piano lessons. My mom, she insisted that I take classical music. She was not a musician, but a very aerodype person. She had two degrees. She was an environmentalist before it was in vogue. She would tell me to read books and things that I didn't have any real connection to in my environment. But it just kind of got me to thinking about a lot of things. And then I played sports, played basketball competitively until I was fourteen fifteen, won a national AAU championship and things like that, chess championships. I was a gamer and a comic book kid more than a music fan. And then I also went to jazz camps because I'm in New Orleans and I'm studying with these guys who are like village elders. You're talking about Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiz, my late great mentor and the one who actually helped me to find my voice as a jazz musician when I was fifteen sixteen. But this is when I was like eleven or twelve, and I didn't understand the word he was saying, and I was just doing it because it was another one of the many activities and things that I was doing. So I didn't really buy my first record or listen to music or say that this influenced that as a musician until I was about fifteen. I was ambivalent to it. It was just around me before that age. I wasn't really an active musician or considered myself a musician until I was fifteen. So it's hard for me to say that my drumming was an impactful thing on my piano playing because it was all just a part of this really rich tapestry of my upbringing that I was fortunate enough to be born into. Without even my knowledge of it being something that is so culturally rich or diverse, I just was in it. And I actually was more ambivalent to being a musician than anything, because everybody was a musician on my father's side of the family. So it was just like, well, I do this, but I don't want to do this for a living. I mean the family business. You want to escape, Yeah, it's like what you know. Couple with the fact that I had this feeling that I wanted to leave New Orleans to explore the world and see the world because I just had so many ideas about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be, and at a certain point, as beautiful as home is and it'll always be home for me, I felt like I needed to make a home for myself somewhere else. And one of your songs is about that, isn't it? On the new albums at Boyhood? About Is that about your father telling you to what it's going to be like in New York City? Do you thinking of boyhood? And tell the Truth? Both songs are about this idea of growing up, coming out of this age of being a boy and a child and a son of your parents, to being a man, being your own man, and understanding you know. He says, tell it like it is love how you live and when you're doing what you do, tell the truth. A lot of people tell you have fun, do your best, but tell the truth. Tell the truth is different to do your best, have fun, give it you all. Tell the truth says something very specific about you going into a dinner Vipers. You're going into a place where there's a lot of posturing and dishonesty and lacks authenticity. So what's gonna make you successful? What's your definition of success? At least that he was trying to impart to me. And what that song is about is a lot of people may not see your truth as successful or as the way or as the thing that is what you should be pursuing. But tell it like it is love how you live when when you're doing what you do, tell the truth. So tell the truth is really about that. You know, those lyrics are all true. Listening to that song. My dad had a small house up on the east side East Louisiana State Drive, small house up on the east side of the Magnani tree in the front yard. You know, this is where I grew up. He grew up in The times were hard and gritty. You know, tell me stories about growing up on tour, people coming into the club pulling out a rifle and the band having to jump behind stacks to amplify as a driving packing the van, you know, touring and driving, being the tour manager, the band performing and also the roadie all in one. Yeah, you know, this is the kind of stuff that that song is about. Wow, do you think you've been able to do that your whole career. Has there ever been a time you thought I'm not quite doing it, I'm not quite telling the truth here. No, I've always told the truth. That's whether it's to my immediate career advancement or detriment. And I've always told the truth. I've happened to get to a point now where telling the truth has allowed me to win an Oscar and being nominated for all these Grammys and all these things. But I know, I don't take it for granted. I'm very humble by the fact that me being who I am and being recognized in this way as a me to have success. And I'm on TV and I'm playing a night in Tunisia on TV. I'm playing jazz and these types of music you never hear on TV, at least when I was growing up, I didn't hear it. And now I'm able to be a household name in a sense doing something that's so true to me. And one day that's not gonna work, I'm sure, so the tables will turn and it will be a moment where me doing this thing and doing my things not necessarily going to be the thing that is going to advance me the most. I'm getting better at telling the truth of who I am and making it something that most people can understand. It's accessible, it's translatable, and that's the goal, right. It's not about popularity. It's about tapping into something in the soul of human kind that is universal and makes people feel like they're not alone. So if I can do that, boom, it's a win. When I was listening to this album, you do a lot of things with your voice. You got a lot of different sounds, and that used to be more common and I'm thinking more pop and soul singers like Stevie Wonder when they talk about his voice, he's got like three or four voices. Paul McCartney's another one who would like he'd growl sometimes, he would do different things. Tell me how you how you approach singing. It's about the message of the song. It's about serving the message of the song, and that means that you have something that you can say honestly. The voice doesn't lie. The voice is so pure and we're so in tune with hearing people's voices from the time that we're born. Musicians, non musicians, music lovers, non music lovers. We just have this radar for truth in the voice, for emotion being transmitted through the voice. And if someone knows that you're not bought in or you're telling something that isn't really to your core a truth for you is not going to stay connected. But for me, the easiest way to do that is to just be telling the truth all the time, or to say something that you really mean all the time. And if I can't get to that, something needs to be adjusted with the music. Something needs to be adjusted with the lyric, something needs to be adjusted with the key, something needs to be adjusted somewhere because I'm not feeling it. I'm not getting to that space with it. Were there songs on this album that you struggled with to find the right voice for? Oh, absolutely all of them. I wouldn't say struggle with, but there were a process for some of them that didn't come as natural, Like Freedom came natural. That's the first take that you hear on the record for Freedom? Is that right? Yeah? Sung that straight down? That was just like, I don't know. That was one of those ones. I need you was like that too, not the first take, but like in the first three takes, I typically only want to do six takes at the most. Three is really my sweet spot. I don't like doing more than six takes. I feel like something misses, I'll have to labor over it in my mind for months. Adulthood was like that. Adulthood was the last one I finished because it was such a personal song for me, but it was covert at the same time. You know, it's KOI personal, but koy and just finding that tone and the spacing of it and the music already said so much. And then I'm also going in that song from singing in my falsetto to rapping, to go from these two vocal approaches and have it be connected in a way that feels organic and inevitable. It just took a lot of thought in thinking through. I love the way that that came out. Did you actually did you sing and rap in the same take? Yeah? Wow, Well that's not always the case. You know. I think about production quality more than I think about trying to preserve a take unless it's the live performance, live band type of album. I don't typically try to perform to take unless that's what's best for the take. Like Boyhood. You mentioned Boyhood earlier. Boyhood The production style for that is not as a performance. It's it's more about this is a produced rap record, an impressionistic rap record, whereas a song like Cry, that's a performance that's on stage with the guitar and we just sing that down with the band. I remember we we played that when in the band band was playing. Steve Jordan was on the drums, incredible Steve Jordan playing and he was doing this thing and he started to scream. He said, oh, he started to scream when he found the right pocket. He was like, this is gonna be the take. You gotta this, this, this is this is it. You gotta record, you gotta record, you know, we record everything. And he he's like, you gotta record. This is gonna be the take, and everybody says that, but when he says it, I know it's true. He's got a gift for that. So Steve was locked in and everybody just locked in at the same time. And when it's like that, you just gotta hit it. You gotta hit you gotta make it, make it happen, baby, come on, sing it sing. It was that great guitar solo on the same take too. Yeah, that's Robert Randolph Robert Randolph is an incredible sacred pedal steel musician, obviously of world renowned. People who know about his music know that he's one of the kings of that style. He just he knows how to do what he's doing, so you just let him have it. It's really more about finding the pocket, the space where I wanted to put it. Tell me about writing that song, because it seems one of the most plaintiff and most kind of emotionally open songs on the record, that right there that I felt that in my soul. I felt that piano riff bow the weeny. I felt that, and I didn't know what I wanted to say, but I felt that. One day, I sat and I played that and I put it on loop and I just listened to it and we listened to it, and I called my friend Steve McEwen, and then he came over and we listened to it, and I was like, I want to say something with this, and I'm just trying to find the words, and I just started singing, which you know, sometimes ends up being a song, even if it starts out it's just mumbles or just turn into what I really want to say. It's in there somewhere and I just started cry cry. I just said, I just want to like cry, cry cry. You know, I started singing. I said I want to cry. But then he's like, that's that's what you want to say. It came out the chorus at least that kind of cry, cry cry. And then when when Nat was there and that was clear, and this when both of those things came together, the song just came out. We just wrote it that day, but it was I had to call Steve. Sometimes you gotta call a friend to kind of put the mirror up to yourself and you know, this is this is what you're saying. Can you see it more clearly? Now? It's like, okay, I got you. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from John Batiste. We're back with Bruce Hellam's conversation with John Batiste. So you said you didn't take being musician seriously until you're around fifteen and started thinking of yourself as one. But then you put your first album out when you were seventeen. What flipped for you? What changed? I gotta give a lot of credit to seeing my peers who were doing it and also having mentorship from people who saw something in me that I didn't see it myself. So I'm thinking about peers of mine, like Sullivan Fortner, who wasn't a professional musician at the time, but I remember him playing the organ in church. I saw a clip of him as this whiz kid on public access television. He was playing the organ and the church at four years old, and he was the quiet, direct, incredible musician. We ended up going to school together. We practiced together for hours and hours at a time, you know, just seeing him somebody who was at the level where people were telling me I'm at this level and then I see this kid who's my age and then oh wow. Or seeing somebody like Troy Andrews trombone Shorty, who was out there touring when he was four years old. And then he came to me on the courtyard in high school. I was fourteen at the time, and he says, let's start a band together, you and I and we started playing at the Maple Leaf Bar, the historic bar on Oak Street. He's like fifteen to sixteen, fourteen, and we're playing in this club every week this New Orleans. So it's not an abnormal thing, but you know, you got this band led by these two fourteen year olds in a barroom on Wednesday nights after school, and just seeing him do that, and recording his first album as a leader, and me helping him kind of put that together, and us being these brothers at this time where you know, we're both trying to put this show together and lead this band, which, by the way, is the band that he still leads today, Orleans Avenue. That was the band that we started in high school before I went to Juilliard. So seeing that and experiencing that and saying, you know, this is really a special thing. This isn't just a part of something I love to do with my dad at home. And this isn't just those classical piano lessons that I'm using my ears to act like I'm site reading box, but I'm really just playing it by ear because I didn't know I had perfect pitch. Like, It's beyond just this activity or this thing that I do. It's this ability to reach people and have a voice and have a real impact in the community and in the world. So something about the epicness of it struck me at that time, seeing those guys who were my age doing things that I thought were really cool, and then having an Alvin Baptiste in my life who was a mentor like no other, who would tell me things about his time hanging with John Coltrane or his time talking Onette Coleman about the meaning of life and music being an allegory, a tonal allegory for life, and how that implies free jazz and avant garde music, which he played and it was completely alienating to most of the audience, but he was so passionate about it, and he would just share these records with me and make me do things musically that I was uncomfortable, to the point that I would grow so dramatically over the course of weeks of just being around him that by the time I was seventeen, I had reached this point where I had felt that was something worth documented. I really didn't know how to produce an album, so my father helped me, but I knew I wanted to do it, and he kind of showed me, and that was really my first production. When I was sixteen, I started writing the music for it, putting the bands together, doing dates around New Orleans on Frenchman Street, playing with all these older musicians who I admired, really calling them for the first time, nervous on the phone, saying will you come and playing my band and then playing the gig and showing them my music and they play and they're like, oh, this is great stuff. And then I'm playing and Donald Harrison Junior, who's another one of my mentors and teachers, playing on the album and really, you know, just saying like, yeah, I believe in this. I see what you're doing, Alvin Battist, I see what you're doing. This is really important. This is the stuff. This is the stuff, man, you have it. Do it. Okay, I'm interested. What did he push you to do on the piano that you said you weren't comfortable doing. It's funny it wasn't the piano. It was the clarinet. My last year of high school. Yeah, sixteen years old. He was a great clarinetist, incredible avant garde jazz, any style of music clarinetist, he could do it. He was an incredible teacher, philosopher. One day he just said, this year you're gonna play the clarinet. And the entire year he studied one on one with me, teaching me the clarinet. And this is not the saxophone. This is not the instrument that you know you consider when you're a sixteen year old high school to be the instrument that you want to study. But he's obviously one of your heroes. So I did it, and it was one of the most important things I ever did, because he was trying to show me that music and your ability, your talent, the innate thing that you have within you can be applied to anything. It doesn't have to just fit the thing that you know you're capable of doing today. And that's why I don't believe in limitations of genre or limitations of creativity in any way. If you're good at this thing, then you can apply that same spark to something else, if you figure out the code of how you can break into that space, into that world of creativity in this arena. So it was an incredible lesson because it wasn't about me becoming the greatest clarinet player in the world. I still play on my records. I played on We Are, played twelve instruments on We Are. I wouldn't have played so many instruments on Who we Are had I thought of myself off as just a pianist just a jazz musician, just this guy from New Orleans. If I limit myself in that way, I won't make who we are. I won't be able to be what it is that I am in the world today. So you got to break the limitations in your mind. And that was an incredible way that he kind of planted that seed. That's interesting because when I was listening many many times to the record, it occurred to me, this is an album actually about music. It's made of music, but there's so many references to music that you talk about your Alto Sacks when you're a kid. You mentioned Obama singing Amazing Grace in one of the songs. Yes, yes, I remember. You had a quote once that you said, the world mostly sees music as entertainment, but it's much more than that. So did your ideas about music change while you made this record. Well, I've had these ideas about music, and just really the public is coming into the consciousness about these ideas I call social music. Fact the album that I put out in twenty thirteen is called social music. And that was kind of when those ideas really became very clearly codified in my mind and I could articulate them and I could speak about them. This was like twenty twenty thirteen, and around that time, the name of my band that I was touring with and knowledge the house band on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to Stay Human band Stay Human. That's when the band name changed to Stay Human. I just had a very clear philosophical awakening about what my understanding of music was at this time when I was coming down from Juilliard, playing in the subways, playing in the streets of New York City, and just really kind of figure it out. Social music, What does that mean in the twenty first century? What are these proto forms of music before entertainment? How they connected to globalization and the connectivity of culture now and the internet in a way that we've all become so enmeshed with each other and have always been, but it's just been more emboldened by technological advancement. How do I represent that as a musician? Social music? So this is a ten year plus concept. It's just now I've been able to really make the album that can reach to people and connect that concept to the greater public. But social music and we are, you know, it's almost like we are is the same conceptual definition as what social music was, except it's evolved and gotten better. As you're talking, it makes sense to me. And you said, you know, you don't want to be bound by being just a New Orleans musician, but that city is one of the few places left where music is played in a lot of different social environments. That's right for most people now, I guess, other than the national anthem, there's not too many social occasions for music or people go to clubs to dance or whatever. And you've always tried to do that. You did that with my New York You played on subways, and when you tell people, oh, he did an album on the subway, they think, oh, you got a subway card. You miked it up. It's like, no, no, no, there are people there playing. And then you also you were in my neighborhood in Brooklyn during the George Floyd protests and you kind of brought music to those protests. So you seem very interested in putting music in different social environments. Tell me first, what was it like when you started playing at the George Floyd protests in Brooklyn? What was that like for you? How did that feel electric? Historic? A reckoning? It felt as if there was a collective consciousness that was focused on the same thing in a rare moment, in a tragic moment, but still very poignant to see all of these voices rise up to speak to the same thing. In contrast to the division that we were seeing and still seeing in the political sphere, there was a unity that I hadn't seen or felt, And there was also a toxicity to what I was seeing on news media and the presentation of these moments. Even across the world, there were so many moments of protests, it felt unified globally. At the same time, it was the synchronicity that I felt it needed, an injection of hope that I think about music being the real universal force of that. I was just seeing people save their destroying thing, police of battling with citizens, and all of this violence and all of this rage, and I just felt that it was such a beautiful moment of synchronicity that if someone with a voice with a platform were to rise up and to represent the universality and the beauty of this moment through a musical expression, that would be very important. That's important to see. From talking to people before he passed away, like Congressman John Lewis in the way he would express the feeling of when they were on the bus in the city ins and they would break out into song in the midst of this pandemonium and incredible duress of spirit being crushed, they would break out in the song and it would be this incredible moment of healing and a bob for everyone who was there, and also a reckoning of truth to show you these are human beings. I didn't even have to think. It was just, Oh, this is what social music is about. This is what I am saying I represent for all these years, and what I believe and I feel to my core is the purpose of music in society. And moments like this, I literally put on my coat and went out the door and called my band and called musicians, and because I'm blessed to have a platform and to be on telligence all these things that I've been blessed with in my career, it was picked up in so many ways by many people, and people saw it. It really impacted a lot of people. But it's not about me. That's just what the music is. That's the truth of the music. It also has a galvanizing quality that can connect people and ideas and can take emotion and transmutate emotion to things that we don't even know but the comes from. And John Lewis would always talk about that kind of solution based approach to dealing with the rest of our times and the inner turmoil that comes with that heaviness that we deal with. You're reminding me that I was thinking back to the clip of Obama that you mentioned in your album when he was singing Amazing Grace. It was literally at a point that he'd kind of run out of things to say, or he didn't know he was a little he was overcome. It's like quite a moment for him. I thought, Man, he listened to the album, and this is probably one of the greatest honors of my life, him reaching out and giving me his thoughts on the album and just telling me that this album is an important piece of American culture and music culture. So to have that reference being the album of him singing an Amazing Grace at that church, what that means, what this album is in the wake of what it represents in the world today, what it represents for me personally as a coming of age thirty three years old, making this album and then for him to reach out full circle to tell me that I sat and listened to this album. It deserves all the accolades is receiving. This is an incredible expression of our identity and ideals as Americans, all these things that are embedded in the album. Right, it's not just music. It's album about music, yes, but it's what is the expression of music being used for at its highest and best use throughout all time. Wow, you're talking so much about social music and music in these different places with bringing people together. But you did it during the pandemic. Right, you wrote this mainly in twenty nineteen. What was it like when you were writing some of these songs and creating some of this music. Were you imagining different environments? I know, I think the song I Need You, you said, was about the the Chitland circuit. Did each song have a kind of social place for you in your brain? Yeah? You know that baseline? Sure don't. Don't. You heard that song and you hear a history when you hit that baseline ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. That that baseline comes with lineage. Uh, It's it's something special about taking things and making them anew by combining them with other things that they maybe haven't met yet or haven't met in that way, and then also taking those elements of things that mean something more and more as time progresses, whether it's going into the past and finding those things are things that are born today, and finding a place for those textures and those colors and those sounds and rhythms and melodies and putting them in a new context. It's endless. It's incredibly rewarding to be able to do that, even if nobody hears it. A song like I Need You, that being my first number one radio song ever, you know, shocking. I was not thinking about that when I was making that song. I was not thinking about that song. Not only just seeing the video the views a mind blowing for me, staggering to see that, but to see folks make videos of themselfs dancing, doing their own dance routines to the song and sending it to me and posting it online. All these things like that for what it represents mind blowing. Do you have a favorite video that someone is sent in the favorite thing that I remember over the pandemic, we did these dance parties. It's dance gatherings, really host these things online and folks from all over the world were tune in. Would go online. I would go on live and I would dance with people playing the song, playing other songs, just for hours at a time, two to three hours, dancing on Sundays, and people would tune in. I would add them to the screen and we would dance together for a song. I remember there was a moment that was somebody in Brazil. Then there was somebody who would in Seattle or San Francisco, and then there was somebody who was dancing in London or something, and it was just incredible, just like there were like dancing outside on the balcony it was nighttime, and then the other people dancing outside in the car, They're like, oh, he added us to the live and they stopped the car on the side of the road, jumped out. Somebody's holding the phone and they would taking turns. It's just such a beautiful expression in a moment where all we see is this kind of darkness and people are talking about isolation, and we got to hold onto our humanity and not let the emotions that can overwhelm us take our humanity and strip it away. We'll be right back with more from John Batiste. After a quick break, we're back with the rest of Bruce Hedlum's conversation with John Batiste. You were talking about trying to put together, you know, that little bassline with different kinds of music. It makes me think that, you know, the New Orleans piano player that you remind me of a lot is James Booker. Was he an influence on you, you know, because he was a guy who brought in classical elements and when he starts playing, you're never sure where it's gonna go. And that's a bit the same with you. Well, James Booker was somebody who was an unsung genius. He was a pianist who played at the Maple Leaf where Troy and I played when we were in high school. His piano was in the corner at the maple Leaf. Is presence was around even before I realized how big an influence he would be. This Maple Leaf bar is where he recorded some of his live albums. Spider on the Keys, which was recorded at the Maple Leaf, was an album. When I started playing at the Maple Leaf with Troy, my dad gave me this record and Spider on the Keys he played it for me. He's like, man, just listen to this cat. And I started listening to it, and I started kind of stealing things. You know, he had this that kind of you know, that little little love feeling to his plan. I started copying that and all a lot of stuff I would cop just take and and absorb. And then folks started telling me around the town. You know the novels are different musicians who I admired, looked up to, and uh, they knew Booker. It would be like, man, you're like little Booker. I'm fourteen fifteen at the time. They were like, man, you got you got the hands like too. And then they're like, man, you look like I had a few musicians over the years that seems there's a magnetism from them being in the world and not being here anymore, and then me being here, and there's a magnetism to their art and the things they left behind. The Loneus Monk was also like that too. When I was nineteen, I listened to him exclusively for almost a year and it was just something. It was a magnetism to his music and his piano playing. There's like a handful of musicians like that where it feels like something is pulling me toward their work. Are there a lot of New Orleans pianists in that list for you? Like, are you the kind of guy that we would hear like do we hear any Professor long Hair in the way you play? Or do we hear like Jack Dupree or any of these kind of guys. Yeah, I think there's a natural bond to all of the musicians who come from the community. You don't have to study them to have that in your plane well book. It was an added level. It was an added kindredness that whether he was from New Orleans or I was from New Orleans or not, whether he was from Omaha and I was from Japan, there's a kindredness to his approach to music that's more genetic, it's more innate. Nina Simone is another one. It's incredible what happens when I listen to them. It's almost like when I'm listening to them on the rector, because I can become them, or it I can be in them mind. It's a really weird feeling that I don't know how to describe other than that, But yeah, Professor long Hair was he I wouldn't say, he's on that list for me in terms of that feeling, But as far as influential figures, him and Lewis Armstrong were probably the two most mythological figures from hometown who I knew before I even knew. Yeah, you know, you hear every Martyr. I remember vividly. It was like a lightning ball struck me when I heard the Marty gral Ad come on TV, and it was every year they would play a Marty gar Ad for a few years. When I was a kid of Big Chief and that's a professor long hair standard and this piano like the that when that kid, oh, and then when he went like that moment, I was like, what is that? And I wasn't even really thinking about a musician perspective for myself. I wasn't thinking to myself as a musician at the time at all. I wasn't trying to be a musician. It was just something about that that was just so communicative. It sounded like a party in second line in Marty Row and Walls. It sounded like so much without having any words attached to it, just that liberal Lanklin or I just knew exactly what he meant, what did you hear in Nina Simone's playing that grabbed you? Are there parts of her technique and what you do well, Her approach to music, her wanted to be a classical pianist and not being able to really achieve that dream. But her synthesis of classical and blues and soul and gospel and jazz, all of these different things she's connected the dots with and her plan really connected with me and my approach naturally, just based upon how I think about music and how I play. But what really connected me most with her as her voice. When I started to really sing and hear her voice in my voice, there would be moments where it would sound like the same person in her essence. Watching her perform I remember I watched some of her live performances when I was in college. I was about to do some performances in Central Park I think it was maybe a Mount Morris Park, and there was some footage that's now actually been made into a documentary. There was a friend of mine who had these archives or tapes. I don't even know how he got him, but he showed me that performance that just struck me. I was like, oh wow, in her voice, her tone, and there's a relationship in her tone, in the way she plays the piano, in her essence that really is connected to how I feel about music. I've heard you say that your piano playing was influenced a lot by Hendrix. Is that true? Yeah? How do you translate kind of what he did to the piano? That fascinates me if you listen to him. He was really a blues musician if you want to put him in any genre, which he's not really possible to put him in a genre. He was more of a blues musician and a rock and roller. And when I think about blues and R and B, that's really what rock and roll actually was. Chuck Berry, little Richard Fast, Domino, these black guys from the South created this rock and roll genre that you know, people who are now thinking about rock and roll, it is not always connected to that. And Jimmy was really the most clear connector of those two errors. And it influences me because I come from these sounds that are just rooted in the same stuff, rooted in the dirt. It's rooted in the blues and gospel and R and being sold. And how do you make that into a very contemporary modern expression through your instrument, not through the style of music you make, the type of album you make, but just through your plan. How do you express that? And one of his great quotes he was talking about I don't play the guitar. I played to amplify it, or to amplify it was an invention. It was a technological advancement of the time. And you know a lot of people play loud and it's brash and it's harsh on the ears, and it's just to be loud. But he said he would play loud to go deeply into the souls of people. And there was just a philosophical way he looked at music in his instrument and looked at how to make it contemporary while still being rooted in all the things that he organically came from. That is an influence for me in a way that I approached the piano and the way that I approach the piano in my songwriting and in my performance. I mean, I know what you mean philosophically, but how do you he says, he's playing the amplifier. When you sit down at the keyboard, are you playing the action? Are you thinking of it in a different way? My playing fits in all different contexts, which is a rare thing. Finding a way to be fully the same as you always are in every context is the first step of what I've done and still continue to develop with my style. And that's something that is not as obvious as you know. And I'm playing now through an amplifier, but takes a lot of thought and ingenuity to really come up with a style that doesn't sound like you're changing hats or you're becoming another musician every time you play in another context. And that was the first real tangible innovation. If you listen to my records, if you listen to my performances, like go listen to me playing with my late friend, the incredible Mac Miller on his last television performance on The Late Show when we did his song Ladders. You know, listen to me there, and then listen to me playing with Willie Nelson, and then listen to me playing just it's a good study, you know. I always trying to do this with my friends, my fellow bandmates. Try to give them a blindfold test and ask them who's that on piano, and they always figure it out. And that gives me great joy because I've spent a lot of time to find that sound. Right now, that's very interesting. There's a lot of Curtis Mayfield on this record. I think, you know, I can hear it in to tell the truth and adulthood and show me the way particularly were you always a fan? Well, that's interesting. I think that the combination of singing in the falsetto register and singing socially conscious music is something that connects to Curtis because he's really one of the most prominent proponents of that approach. I wasn't thinking of Curtis when I was making in the album, although the comparison is the highest honor that I could ever hear, because knowing what he represented in his time and being a fan of his just generally as a fan of music, I really do take that as a high compliment and full transparency. I wasn't trying to do that. I was more again trying to explore my voice and figure out what the best way to deliver the messages honestly of each song would be. And I think that that's a really cool thing that it resonates with you in the space that Curtis resonates with you, because in a sense, that's what I was trying to do, although not as directly. We haven't even mentioned that you want an oscar for the soundtrack to Soul. And part of that soundtrack was you did a great cover of It's all Right, his great song with the impressions. What was that like doing that song? Man? And I loved it. I was crying. I was in tears. I was in tears because it was just such a heavy time and every time I listened to the playback, it really brought me tears of joy. I don't know why. I still don't know why. And I had the same experience. You know, my collaborator on the film creative the movie Soul, and the genius behind a lot of Pixar films, Pete Doctor, he called me one day and he said he had the same experience listening to the work tape. He was crying and didn't know why. He was in tears, and I was just so moves because and I didn't tell him this at the time, but I revealed to you that I was. I had the same experience with the recording. I don't usually have that emotional connection like that to my recordings, but it was something about the you know, finishing the record during the pandemic and Curtis's song and just what he's sang in the song. When you wake up early in the morning feeling sad, like so many of us do, just hum a little soul and make life your goal, and surely something's got to come to you. See. It's all right that that part with those chords, this is harblin soul. Make life your goal and join us up. That's got to come to you, see it. It's all right, you know that what it just it hits you. Man. You know, I could go on and on about that song, but yeah, man, Now in that context, I was definitely thinking about Curtis and trying to uphold the essence of that song and the ethos of what he created, but make it my own and make it match the film and all that. So it was truly a special experience finding that balance. M Now, when you play these songs live, this is a more our pop oriented album and it's more produced in a way than some of your other work. And I guess I'm interested in how you balance your love of jazz improvisation or improvisation in general. That you came through jazz with this idea of kind of more formal compositions. How do you think about it? When you're playing these songs live, you supersede the expectations and you crush them with brilliance. You make that sound easy. Yeah, it's not easy. I mean I've almost fainted on stage just given them my all. We've done shows over the last year, you know, playing Austin City Limits. We did an incredible show. We did three hours long show that was broadcasting Austins litson. We did the festival that we did, all a lot of performances, less to do, two performances in Central Park, sixty thousand people performing these songs, performing the songs in different parts of the world, through the pandemic, somehow still making it happen. And man, every show, I'm just giving so much. I got the wardrobe change. Like in the tradition of James Brown as one of my patron saints of the live show, live experience, where it's just a revival. It feels like you're connected to something greater than yourself and you're in the audience and it's not about me. It's about that feeling prevailing. It's just about capturing the people, putting them in this space together and experiencing this vibration that is just transcended and if if you do that, they're not gonna be worry if you didn't do it exactly like the record, I'm interested in what you learned about tapping into that frequency, into getting that concert experience. Have you learned how to do that and how do you approach that well. You talk about this being my first kind of very produced pop album, and it really is. I say it's my first album many senses because my extensive history up to this point of doing completely independent album since the album I maybe when I was seventeen, and I love that because it allowed me to have fifteen years of being a live musician as a bandleader, and also the time before that when I was a kid in New Orleans playing in bands. So when it comes to a live show, I feel like I have multiple degrees in how to put on a live show. I also have a time in my life that I'm blessed to be on TV, which is incredible with the genius of Stephen Colbert. But that's also putting in perspective. For the last seven years, I haven't been able to tour, so when I'm ready to tour, and when I'm done with the show, I'm about to knock people's socks. So I'm about to blow their lights out. You have not seen the fullness of what it is that I'm about to bring to the stage. I am not worried about that part at all. That's the part that I feel like. It's like the that's the one two punch, like that's the second punch. That's the like bam, I mean, listen, we are ready. I am fully fully ready. Okay, Well, this album is. It's a great jab So thank you so much for talking. It's been just great. Let's get it. Thank you again, yeah baby. Thanks the John Patis for talking to us about making his new album. We Are and we hope he wins all eleven Grammys that he's up for. You can check out a playlist with all of our favorite Jompatis songs at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where we can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ben Taliday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chaffey. Our executive producer is Miila Bell Broken Record. It's a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others some Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription service that offers bonus content an uninterrupted, ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast. That a theme music's by the Great Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.