Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
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This message comes from Capital One. Your business faces unique challenges and opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services backed by the strength of a top 10 commercial bank. Visit CapitalOne.com slash commercial. Member FDIC. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. It's always a joy when John Batiste joins us at the piano, and that's how I felt about the session we recorded last week with him at the piano.

Batiste was the bandleader and music director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from its premiere in 2015 until 2022. That same year, his album called We Are received 11 Grammy nominations in seven different categories and won five Grammys, including Album of the Year. He wrote the score for this year's film Saturday Night about the first SNL broadcast. He also appears in the film as musician Billy Preston, the first musical guest.

Batiste is a jazz musician who also studied classical music at Juilliard, where he got his B.A. and M.A. and is now on the board. But his music is more expansive than jazz and classical, as you can tell just by the varied Grammy categories in which he's been nominated for or won awards.

Jazz performance, American roots song, contemporary classical composition, jazz instrumental, R&B album, improvised jazz solo, pop duo or group performance, and original score for the animated film Soul.

He currently has two Grammy nominations, Best Music Film and Best Song Written for Visual Media, for the documentary American Symphony. The film is about composing his American Symphony and performing the premiere in Carnegie Hall.

The film also developed into something totally unexpected. A document of the period his wife, Sulayka Jawad, was diagnosed with a recurrence of leukemia, which had been in remission for over 10 years. The first and second occurrences required bone marrow transplants, which necessitates brutal doses of chemo. We'll talk about what that period was like for him a little later.

The occasion for his appearance today is his new album, Beethoven Blues. It features his reimaginings of Beethoven compositions. Since we're fortunate to have him at the piano, he'll play some of the music from that album and more. John Batiste, welcome back to Fresh Air. I love your new album. The documentary about you and your wife's bone marrow transplant was

was like really moving. So it's a pleasure to have you back on our show. And how is she? She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person. She sounds that way from the documentary. And I'm very glad to hear that. So I want to start with some music. And you are at the piano, so you will be playing it for us. And the lead track of your Beethoven blues album is for Elise.

And I think anyone who's taken piano lessons with any amount of classical music has had to learn this. And you do some really fascinating things with it. Why is that the lead track of the album? 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

It's rare for us to have, all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that. Yeah, and you learned it as a kid? I learned it 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.

So before you play it, I want to ask you, are you going to play it like you played it on the album? Because my understanding is you did a lot of improvising in real time for that recording. Or are you going to do different things with it now? 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 first.

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. 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. Okay, let's hear it. You're at the piano. Can you play it? Of course. ♪

That was great. That's John Batiste at the piano at the studio of WNYC. And it's also the lead Beethoven tune on his new album, Beethoven Blues. And John, that sounded great. You know, you mentioned...

in, I think, your official statement about the album that you think Beethoven is really kind of connected to the blues, even though he's centuries before the blues. Can you just illustrate what you mean by that? Like play some passage of Beethoven that makes you think of the blues? 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 in a two meter, one, two, one, two, which is like a march. And Waltz's. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. So if you put the march, pop, pop.

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. Tell me what you mean. This polyrhythm rhythm.

Even in that short theme, you're hearing the two and the three. Short, short, short, long, short, short, short, long. 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. It's just something in the DNA of that sound.

Don't you find it interesting that there are certain like harmonies, chords, rhythms that it took centuries to or millennia to get to? You know, like jazz chords, gospel chords, like they weren't, quote, invented yet in Beethoven's time. Well, that's the beauty of this project that I find the artist of today has this golden opportunity. You can connect dots that were never connected before.

Blues was a feeling since the beginning of time. You hear it in the pentatonic scale, one of the most ubiquitous scales in music, this scale, five notes. 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. 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. 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. So there's another Beethoven...

symphony excerpt that I'd like you to play for us, if you will. And it's from a symphony number five, which again, is something like everybody knows is that that one. Yes, yes. So what do you hear in this that made you want to, like reimagine it, improvise on it?

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. So it was a beautiful thing to hear it first as...

and then think about. Yeah, love it. You went to Juilliard. So in addition to studying classical music in New Orleans when you were young, you went to Juilliard, I think you were 17, and you didn't know how to sight-read when you got there. At a certain point, maybe junior year, was it, that you were told to take a year off or get kicked out? Yeah, that's right.

So what was their problem with you? Well, you know, I had a lot. Was it that you were doing all this stuff to the classics? You know, that's. Did you demonstrate the problem just now? I mean, I may have. One of the things, I had this instrument, you know. You brought your melodica with you. Yes, I have my melodica everywhere I go. I did in those days at least. It's like a harmonica and a keyboard put together. I would carry it around school all the time.

And, you know, I was just a very, very ambitious, precocious teenager in New York from Louisiana in the big city now. And the world literally was my oyster. I felt like I could go out and put bands together and, you know, sometimes I'd even put

acting troops together and I would combine the divisions to do projects that I dream up where I'd get dancers and actors and musicians and we would go down into the subways and we'd play for folks. I just don't think at that time they could understand the bigger vision that I saw in my head. So, you know, things started to get to a point where they felt I wasn't focused enough, I guess. So, you've said that

You were told to stop playing melodica, and that's what got you sent to a psychiatrist. I wasn't sure what that meant, whether they told you you needed to go to a psychiatrist or you decided to go to a psychiatrist. And what was the reason for that? Well, you know, I had a fairly easy time with some of the assignments that would, you know, I guess take some others a longer period of time to master, and I would

basically sometimes I'd sit in class and this time I'd be there and hearing music in my head and I'd sing out loud and these are just things that I didn't really know I was doing. It's part of this sort of, this world that I was living in, I guess, as a defense mechanism. You know, I'd hear music and I'd sing out loud in the middle of class and then they would think, well, what's wrong with this guy? And he's got this melodica that he's carrying around and he's doing all of these zany projects and he's, you know,

He's really unique, to say the least. And at one point, one of my teachers had a conversation with the dean, and then there was a whole thing where everybody kind of co-signed this notion that maybe he should see someone. Maybe there's something up with this kid. He needs to go. And so I sat down, and I had an evaluation with the dean,

the counseling department at Juilliard. And it was a beautiful exchange that I didn't really see as an evaluation or any sort of problem. It just was a conversation for a long time that led to the conclusion that I didn't have any issues other than that, you know, and I mean, I'm still humbled to hear, but he says this guy is a genius, the likes of Charlie Parker, which we have

I haven't seen here and we're lucky to have. And that was your diagnosis. That was what they said. Yeah. I mean, that's what they said. I don't know if I believe that, but that's what then they kind of left me alone until junior year a little bit. They really leave me alone. But until junior year, I got to the point where.

The things I was doing outside of school, I was touring and I was playing shows and I was coming in and I was doing the work, but I also was not following the pattern of the ideal student. And it became a question of my, is my ambition going to pull me out of school before they kick me out of school? And they wanted me to make the choice. Why did you go back after the year?

My mother, she's, you know, the reason I play the piano. She's the one who's kind of always there to see me through if I have a question about, you know, this is something that I believe in, but doesn't seem like it's clicking. She was like, you know, you got to think with your own mind. Nobody has anything that they know that is more than you. You respect people and you learn from folks. But if you know something and you know it and believe it and follow through and don't quit.

So she just told me all of these different ways of affirming the things I believed about music and the ways that I wanted to approach giving that to the world and uplifting folks and healing folks.

And, you know, my dad is my first musical mentor, and he's someone who, through his experience playing on the Chitlin Circuit, doing all these incredible performances from, you know, the likes of Isaac Hayes. And I remember they played the same bill as the Jackson 5 at one point early on. And just his stories of, you know, traveling, he always wished that he could go to a school like Juilliard and do something like that. So, you know, it's for the legacy of my family.

And, um, I mean, now fast forward a decade later, I'm on the board and I'm helping to change the place for folks who come in there like me, who are maybe not the, uh, the, the typical conservatory musician student, uh,

Joining us at the piano is John Batiste. After a break, he'll play more music for us and talk about two years ago, the year he won multiple Grammys, but at the same time, his wife had a recurrence of leukemia requiring a bone marrow transplant. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nusberg, digital producer at Fresh Air. And this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter. And I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week's shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read. It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week.

and exclusive. So subscribe at whyy.org slash fresh air and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning. There was one piece, I think it was the Brahms Ballad No. 1. Do you say ballad or ballad? Ballad. Ballad, yeah. So it's the Brahms Ballad No. 1. You spent one year studying that one piece. Yes.

And you kept, I assume, kept hearing new things in it. And can you play an example of how you originally heard it and how you heard nuances that you didn't hear before and played it differently than you did before after working with your teacher? Oh, yeah. This is one of the things I love the most. So I'll just start with the first chord. It's D minor.

All Intensive Purpose of D minor, okay? So now I'm going to voice this chord with the same notes, but it's going to sound completely different based upon what voices I bring out. Now this is one element of a world of nuance that I learned from my mentor, William Doglin. Now, pressing the key, all of your sound comes from this very inside bass ball. Now all of your sound comes from

the first joint of your finger. So these are different sounds that you can get just using that first joint. You know, like sometimes you see at the piano somebody playing and their hands are rising and their hands are, you know, it's all very dramatic the way their hands are. And I'm never sure whether that's showmanship or if it makes a difference sonically or rhythmically. You know what I mean? Well, there's certain aspects of it that are for show and certain aspects of it that are real. You know, there's a

a beauty in developing your own technique at the instrument. You know, I learned a lot from William and I learned a lot from Monk and I learned a lot from a lot of the different pianists that I grew up listening to in New Orleans. And you develop your own pedagogy. You know, I like to play with rings on. There's something about the equilibrium of my hand that when I have a pinky ring on, it really establishes a certain sort of attack and balance and there's a certain ictus to the sound that I like.

So that chord that you played for us in the Brahms, put that in context, like play the whole sentence, if you know what I mean? Absolutely. A piece full of nuance. We'll hear more with John Batiste after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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Toward the end of that period, which is also the period that you were nominated for a record number of Grammys in different categories, and you won five Grammys, including Album of the Year, your now wife, Sulayka Jouad, she was very sick. She had had a recurrence of leukemia that she'd had about 11 years before that, and she needed a bone marrow transplant, her second one, because she had one during the first occurrence.

And those are just awful. I mean, basically they give you this very, very heavy-duty chemo that nearly kills you. It kills your immune system so that you don't fight the transplant. But a lot of people come within an inch of death and then have to recover. And your immune system's shot, so you can't be around anything or any body that might expose you to any kind of germ.

what was it like for you to be living in two worlds at once? You're getting all these accolades. You're performing on the Grammys. You're still at late night with Stephen Colbert. People are seeing you every night. You have a reputation of joy, of bringing joy to where you are. And meanwhile, your wife is really suffering. I'm sure you are suffering just watching her. What was it like to have two worlds at the same time?

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. 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. And through creativity,

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, and she's this incredible, renowned writer, but she couldn't write, so she began to paint. And just that practice alone was a form of transformative healing power 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. To go. And, you know, 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 people.

the will to go out and do all the things that you saw me doing at that time. Can you play one of the lullabies that you sent her? 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...

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 that's in the world called Butterfly, but there are dozens of these lullabies. But Butterfly started like this. Butterfly, flying home But can you fly on your own Take your place in the world today

Butterfly flying home. Cherry plum and chewing gum. Mini skirts and cars at home. Driving around with your head held high. Butterfly flying home. Just a little taste of it. That was beautiful, John.

Thank you. You know, the beginning, getting back to Beethoven, the beginning of that reminded me of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Oh, well, you know, there's something about the themes that Beethoven was able to... Am I crazy for saying that, by the way? No, no. It's something about the themes he was able to manifest that are...

all sitting right there, you know, 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 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. That feeling is connected to music.

the 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 we we deal with our internal world and how we 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

So in what you just played, the right hand is beautiful. The left hand is stormy. It's dissonant. It's such a contrast to the right hand. And one of the things that attracts me to Beethoven is the storminess of a lot of his music, the darkness of it.

Were you particularly thinking of Beethoven when your wife was sick? Because it was both beautiful, but stormy, but, you know, dark and dissonant and a little, you know, there seems to be like a warning in some of that music. Right. It's very foreboding. It has that sense. Foreboding. That is the word. Thank you. No, no. It really, I speak about his music in that way because it's,

It's not that I was thinking about him directly or his music. It's more that his music represents something that is bigger than him in the way that all of that one percentile of greats, their work represents this thing that is a universal idea that no one had pulled down from the divine subconscious yet.

Are you going to be bringing more of the pain that you experienced during that period into your public persona and your performances?

Because you're always equated with joy and love, and you gave this phenomenal performance at the Grammys. You were such a great dancer, and you were surrounded by great dancers. And it was just really, like I said, so joyful. At the same time, there was so much suffering going on in the background of your life, or the foreground of your life, I should say, really. So will you be bringing more of that into your public persona as...

and be more identified with, you know, the darker part of life as well as the joyful part? Well, there's a couple things there. I think that I'm associated with joy because I do it to a level that

is hard to come by. I do it well, and it's not something that you see often. In particular, when you think of performers who are in the mainstream, there's this sense of joy that I bring that is very, very singular, and I enjoy that, and I think it's very important to have joy in your expression, in the expression of black American artists and artists across all cultures.

But I also think that there's always been this underpin in my music that's coming from struggle and coming from many things that may be transmuting to joy later, but don't start that way. And I think there's a lot of reasons why the choice to latch on to the joyous aspects of what I presented, me to continue to

deliver that to the people as an antidote to the times that we're in. My guest is John Batiste. He's joining us at the piano. His new solo album is called Beethoven Blues. We'll talk more after a break. This is Fresh Air.

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So at the same time that your wife was getting the bone marrow transplant,

you were also writing, composing your American Symphony. And the theme of that is featured on your album Beethoven Blues.

This was a piece where you wanted to bring together influences of all different kinds of music and not just have classical music in one category and jazz in another, but bring together all forms of American music. So there's classical, there's influences of gospel and other black musics, indigenous music, folk music, classical music. And you had, you know, different types of musicians performing. Can you play the theme of

which is also featured on your album, Beethoven Blues. Yes. And if you're just joining us, John Batiste is at the piano. It's really beautiful. What did you want to express with that? That's one example of something that certainly leads to joy, but comes from deep, deep pain and an unresolved...

duress that our country is founded upon and many of the things that we are in debate around and the culture clashes of our time and the shift that is occurring right before our eyes in our time. And really just thinking about a theme that cuts through all that and really speaks to it at the same time, this melody that

It could be a chant. It could be a prayer. It can be a hymn. It can be a war cry. It's a theme that is using the pentatonic, which is the scale that I mentioned earlier that has this sort of connection to so many other cultures around the world. And I knew I wanted to have a sound that if I had the indigenous musicians sing it or if I had

the choral players play it or if I had the slide guitar play it or if I had the violin section play it or whatever way that I wanted to orchestrate that theme, it would communicate a different layer of the story, a different part of this experience. And you hear this throughout the symphony. It's a traveler's theme as well. It's moving. You know, every time we perform it,

I don't imagine it being the same. I imagine it being something that molds and shifts and evolves with the ensemble and who's joining the orchestra and the orchestra being something that is constantly evolving. It's not just a symphony orchestra, it's orchestra plus and putting this theme on the Beethoven album.

was something that is an ode to Beethoven and the tradition of how he transformed the symphonic tradition and brought in all of the different sounds that he brought in and the rhythmic concepts that we talked about and the melodic ubiquity of all these themes that we know and love. And just thinking about this, my first symphony, American Symphony,

being in that tradition and in a tradition of the greats who are maybe unsung, who also wrote in connection to the American experience, William Grant Still, James Reese Europe, Florence Price, all the composers who are speaking to this over time. It's just something that is very important to me. The night of the premiere at Carnegie Hall, the power went out during the performance.

Did you see that as like an omen or a sign of something? Yes, Terry, it was a sign because we were doing something that needed to be done. Every time you do something that you're supposed to be doing, you're going to face some form of attack, some form of pushback. And this is the first time in the history of the hall, of Carnegie Hall, that that's happened. You know, things like that will happen.

And that's how you know you're doing the thing that you need to be doing. When The Power came back and the performance continued, were you in a different musical state of mind than you'd been in before? Oh, my goodness. It's funny because I looked up in the balcony in the audience and I looked down at the folks that were right near the stage and I could look in people's eyes and I could see nobody really knew

They could sense maybe something was happening, but the majority of folks didn't know that the power went out because it was only on stage. So this is a moment where we're cueing the orchestra through the analog synths and the modular synthesizers, but they can't cue the orchestra because the power's out. So no one on stage, you have all these, you know, over 100 musicians sitting there looking to me for direction. No one knows what to do. So what I thought at that moment

was, okay, I'll play. And I improvised, you know, maybe a, it was a true spontaneous composition that bridged to the movement that we were just about to start. It bridged to it without knowing how long I'd need to create this interlude, this bridge. I did it just the piano alone, which was completely acoustic.

And then the orchestra comes in. No one knows that we had this complete disastrous mishap, but I was already in this mindset where nothing is going to stop me. And that's probably why I was able to play the thing that I played and not skip a beat, because there was just this series of constant pushback from the time we decided to do this piece, coupled with the fact that it's just a complete unknown whether or not Sulayka was going to make it.

There was all this hoopla around my career and these incredible milestones that we worked so hard for. And then this ability to just now, after it all, come on stage and play this piece. Nothing was going to stop that. Thank you. It's just been absolutely a pleasure and an honor for me. So be well, and I wish you all good things. Yes, indeed. Thank you, and likewise to you and your family. Thank you so much.

John Batiste's new solo piano album is called Beethoven Blues. He joined us from public radio station WNYC in New York, where he was recorded by George Wellington. Special thanks to Aaron Cohn and WNYC. There's a part two of that interview with John Batiste at the piano, in which he talks about and plays and sings some of his favorite Christmas songs, and a couple of mine. We'll play that Christmas week on Monday, December 23rd. I think you'd really enjoy it.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Danielle Deadweiler. She stars in the new Netflix film adaptation of August Wilson's play, The Piano Lesson. She'll talk about her craft, her choices to portray historical figures like Emmett Till's mother, and what it was like to work with Denzel Washington and his family to bring The Piano Lesson to the screen. I hope you join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Rebo Donato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Seward. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Tariq Rose.

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That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.

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