Jon Baptiste Colbert White and Blue Blue Dress
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Jon Batiste reached over to the Crosley record player in his dressing room at the Ed Sullivan Theater. He lifted the needle so that Stevie Wonder's In Square Circle could provide a little background music while he talked in the dim glow of what once was Carol Burnett's dressing room. Old-fashioned showbiz lights still frame the vanity's mirror, although the vanity itself is covered with books, hats, records and a speaker. A couple of paintings lean against the mirror.
The musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was quiet and relaxed, possibly the most subdued he'd been all day.
Batiste, 31, rarely stays still, which is the only way a person can hold down his Late Show gig while also acting as artistic director at the National Jazz Museum of Harlem, recording new music, promoting a Christmas album, reimagining "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," collaborating with Wynton Marsalis, writing op-eds for The New York Times and constructing a tribute to dancer Carmen de Lavallade for the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors. Batiste is arguably the country's most visible preservationist and celebrator of jazz. He and Stay Human, The Late Show's house band, reach roughly 3 million people each night through their televisions.
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Jon Batiste's fingers glide across the keys of a Steinway & Sons piano in the Stay Human rehearsal space ahead of a live taping at The Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City.
Melissa Bunni Elian for The Undefeated
The Late Show has recently vaulted to the top of the late-night ratings on the wings of host Stephen Colbert. Monday through Friday he provides a wry yet sunny accounting of how the world is descending into a morass of fear, uncertainty and, lately, how it's being pushed there by famous men who can't keep their hands to themselves. Batiste sets off the monologues with a tinkle of piano keys, a laugh or a quip. He's the amen corner for Colbert's sharpest jabs.
On the gray, overcast day after a terrorist plowed into a bike path in New York, killing eight people, Batiste strode into his eighth-floor office. When he crossed the threshold to find a stranger waiting for him, he held out his hand and let out one of his trademark "Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaahs."
His buoyant, irrepressible happiness might seem inappropriate for the day after a tragedy, even for a man who comes from the land where people give you a parade when you die. (He grew up in Kenner, Louisiana, about 20 minutes from New Orleans, before moving to New York as a teen to attend The Juilliard School.) Nevertheless, he was humming, scatting and upbeat. Batiste considers transmitting that energy to be part of his job.
"It's an interesting line to thread, to find a joyous sound that also matches the tone of the material in the show," Batiste said. "That's the real challenge every day, is finding out, OK, how do we find that thing that's gonna push the energy that we want forward but not come across as insensitive or not come across as kitsch or out of taste? And that's what I enjoy. I love these artistic challenges."
He'd been listening to The Commodores on the way to work, and he sat down on the small gray couch in his office, barely able to contain his humming until I joined him in the chorus of "Lady (You Bring Me Up)."
Admittedly, it's hard not to bop your head once you hear the lively strings and driving beat of "Lady." The Commodores are part of a playlist that Batiste made for 2017. At the beginning of every year, he compiles a mix of songs, a sort of aural lookbook for the next 365 days. This year's mishmash included contemporary Bob Dylan, 1920s and '30s Louis Armstrong, Peggy Lee and Michael Jackson's Dangerous album.
The yearly mix provides a thematic foundation for what Batiste wants to reference in the show. About a week after we spoke, Batiste and Stay Human played an arrangement of "Lady" during a Late Show commercial break. It's evidence of the thoughtfulness that defines his tenure as Late Show bandleader.
"I like putting stuff into the machine and then seeing what comes out of the machine. The brain, that's like our processing machine," Batiste said. "So for me, I like to just make a list of all the stuff that I want to digest and assimilate and then I just live with it."
Batiste has had years of experience putting music into his "processing machine." He began playing with his father, Michael, in the family's Batiste Brothers Band when he was about 6 or 7.
The Batistes are one of New Orleans' most respected and legendary jazz clans, and they've often worked side by side with the Marsalis family. Both Batiste and his mentor, Wynton Marsalis, attended high school at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Wynton's father, pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr., headed the jazz department there and was succeeded by clarinetist Alvin Batiste, a distant cousin of Jon's.
"Him and Alvin and Clyde Kerr and Kidd Jordan, they were like the four village elders who taught everybody in New Orleans music from the last 40 years," Batiste said. His upbringing in a family of jazz musicians and his experiences playing point guard, both in school (where he was part of a state championship-winning squad) and for an AAU team, gave Batiste his energy, his musical acumen and his constant all-American drive for self-improvement.
Jon Batiste is an avid dresser, usually opting for suits with bold colors or prints paired with custom made sneakers.
Melissa Bunni Elian for ESPN
"It's a discipline to achieve whatever your desired end result is," Batiste explained. "In sports, there's a score. There's statistics, and there's a winner and a loser and a championship, and there is one team that gets it. It's just very clear-cut.
"I think, in order to get better at being a musician and a bandleader and a composer and all these different things, you have to create things that are that clear-cut, because the competition that you're up against is yourself. So it's harder, if you're not willing to look into the mirror, to define what the end result is. It's very easy to get to a certain level and to just coast, and to not push yourself to be better, because nobody is really keeping score."
That constant pushing isn't just what Batiste expects of himself. He expects it of his bandmates in Stay Human too.
It's important to get "the team to where's there's a built-in camaraderie and built-in sense of purpose, that you're OK passing your guy the ball to take the shot when it counts in the fourth quarter," Batiste said, again likening the job to running a basketball team. "It's not always going to be you that gets to take that shot. You may have to trust your sixth man, or your 2 guard. You're running point, and I played a lot of point. You're going to have to trust … I'm not going to be able to take this shot. This is not a smart shot for me to take."
Batiste comes to work after lunch — this time, he raved about the meatball sandwich at a spot on 53rd Street and Ninth Avenue — usually taking a car from his apartment in midtown Manhattan. His office is filled with sunlight, although the view is basically of a construction crane, thanks to New York's never-ending real estate development. He's got two keyboards, a Mac, an amp, a drum set, an electric bass and a Mason & Hamlin baby grand piano. An unopened bottle of Dom Pérignon still in the box, sits on his windowsill — he doesn't drink.
He catches up on the news and tries to get an idea of what the show will address. Because Colbert riffs on the day's news for his nightly monologue, things at The Late Show are often in flux right up until it's time to tape the show. That means Batiste finds himself flipping through the musical library in his head on deadline and making last-minute changes at sound check.
"Picking music for TV is so specific," Batiste said. "It has a mystery to it until you pick that right song, play that right beat, and then it's like, 'Oh, of course I should have been doing that.' So it's a mystery until then. You gotta crack the code."
The code-cracking continues in the Stay Human rehearsal space, which is about the size of a McMansion bathroom.
Jon Batiste, left, reacts to the music while practicing new material with his band, Stay Human, a few hours ahead of a live taping at The Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City.
Melissa Bunni Elian for The Undefeated
The Late Show tapes four days a week. So Monday through Thursday, 10-plus people cram into the space with their instruments, including a tuba and a drum set, and jam.
Batiste's assistant squeezes into a chair next to the upright Steinway and plays a song from her phone through the Marshall speaker that sits on the piano. Gradually, the band picks up the groove and joins in. There's little to no sheet music.
Batiste and the band rehearse for roughly an hour, their choices guided by that night's guests and notes from a morning production meeting that his assistant attends. Then he's off to comedy rehearsal with Colbert, where the two go through Colbert's proposed monologue. A small gathering of crew makes up the audience for the rehearsal, which was kept so off-limits that not only could I not watch, I couldn't even be in the building while it was taking place.
All those little riffs and interjections that feel natural and spontaneous when you watch Colbert's monologue? They've been rehearsed.
After comedy rehearsal, Colbert and his staff make script changes and Batiste refines his music selections. Then there's a sound check on the stage with the whole band. This time, Batiste was working through a song with Jonathan Groff, who played King George in Hamilton and now stars on the Netflix series Mindhunter. The two fumbled around to find the right key for a jokey promotional duet for Mindhunter that Groff sang with Colbert.
While everyone ventured off to hair and makeup, Late Show staff members shepherded the night's audience into their seats. They were treated to a bawdy warm-up act by comedian Paul Mecurio. Batiste and Stay Human played a 15-minute concert, and Colbert came out, introduced himself to the audience and took questions.
Finally, they make the television that shows up after the local news five nights a week.
Duke Ellington favored natty suits and a top hat. Cab Calloway rarely performed without his conductor's baton, white waistcoat and tails.
While Colbert sticks to a uniform of sober suits and dress shoes, his bandleader favors blazers from Mr. Turk and fresh Jordans. Batiste is a consummate sneakerhead, and while he sat and talked on his sofa, he casually dribbled a basketball between his feet.
Now Batiste has access to an entire collection of covetous footwear, an actual binder full of sneakers, via The Late Show's stylist. He's an admirer of Russell Westbrook's sartorial boundary-pushing, and though his loyalties are not wedded to one particular NBA team, he casually follows Oklahoma City.
Unlike Calloway, Batiste doesn't come out in a zoot suit every night. But there's a special element of showmanship involved in being a bandleader. It's a skill, one that Batiste, who swears he used to be shy, had to learn. And his personal style, which he began to cultivate after moving to New York, is part of it. Presentation, he insists, is separate from being a skillful musician.
Jon Batiste is an avid dresser, usually opting for suits with bold colors or prints paired with custom made sneakers.
Melissa Bunni Elian for The Undefeated
"I think it really is important to think of them as different things," Batiste said. "It requires a certain understanding of yourself and your comfort zone, and then stepping outside that and expanding your comfort zone. I actually didn't see a connection with the two. Also, when I was growing up, it was more the older family members who took that role of presenting the band and everything like that. … That's always a shock to people who I've known for a long time, to see how both those things have developed. It's a surprise, almost, like a different person has emerged."
Batiste interprets the world through the youthful ears of a wizened soul. His workspaces at The Late Show are a cornucopia of old and new. Crosley and Marshall are companies that specialize in making music equipment that draws on vintage aesthetics but benefits from modern technological innovation. It's a theme that recurs throughout Batiste's working life — he began playing for vocalist Cassandra Wilson, now 61, when he was just 22. He's a jazz musician whose instrument of choice is the melodica, a contraption that looks like a small hand keyboard with a mouthpiece and sounds like a harmonica.
"A lot of people think that this instrument, you know, is like a child's toy," Batiste said, but he loves it. He recounted how he showed it to Stevie Wonder the first time they met, when Batiste was still a student at Juilliard.
"Man, you ever played one of these?" Batiste asked Wonder.
Wonder took the instrument, played it, then gave it back.
"Yeah, I used to play them, but I would get so much spit in them, I stopped," Wonder told him.
"Oh, you got jokes!" was Batiste's retort.
Unlike many of his earliest predecessors in jazz, Batiste boasts formal musical training besides everything he learned in his family's band. He earned a master's degree from Juilliard.
"I feel like it connects me to the ancestors more, the kind of founding fathers of the music," Batiste said of his musical education. "Mothers and fathers, because women were a big part of it as well. There's a lot of female artists that I think are still actually becoming recognized that we don't even know about. The training just gives me another tool. Nothing can hurt you in pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of your craft.
"You know, there were great musicians who were the most erudite, studied, and they knew everything there was to know even before there were all these schools. And there were also musicians who didn't know all that stuff, but they knew it in their own way. So, in my mind, I don't even think about it like I'm educated more so than a musician who didn't go to a conservatory. It's just I know the terminology. But the person who knows it is the one who experiences it. So, if somebody is playing it on their instrument, they know it. … Whether they call it a C scale or dominant seventh chord or they just know it by whatever they know in their mind, when they play, it's there."
In Batiste's office there's a poster of Mavis Staples, one of his many heroes.
"She's not just a musician now, she's bigger than music," Batiste said. "[Her involvement] in the civil rights movement and being a force for goodwill and a force of peace and a force for faith and a force in all kinds of ways. It's amazing."
Staples represents what he wants to achieve, Batiste said, "just what kind of energy I want to have as a performer and a celebrity. Somebody that's authentic and is very real and also accomplished and all that, at the same time."
In marrying youth with tradition, drawing a line from zoot suits to Jordans, Batiste has become a vehicle for advocating and communicating about jazz. He's reverential, but not stuffy, and always repping New Orleans. (When it comes to gumbo, Batiste prefers filé to okra as a thickener for the city's signature stew — that's how his mama makes it.)
For decades, there's been a panic that jazz, born in Louisiana and spread via the Great Migration, radio and vinyl, is dying. As once-booming jazz corridors in cities such as Washington, D.C., and Kansas City have shrunk or transformed, those changes are accompanied by understandable worries that no one's interested in carrying on the genre's traditions, that a uniquely American art form is going underappreciated outside of Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and rich people's wedding receptions. Damien Chazelle won an Academy Award for directing a movie around that theme.
But there's always a young, handsome, passionate and charismatic ambassador keeping the legacies of Bird and Miles and Satchmo alive. In the '90s, it was Batiste's mentor, Wynton Marsalis. Now Batiste has picked up the torch, along with the requisite fedora and porkpie hat — he's got a stack of them in his dressing room and more in his office. As for the next generation? Well, Batiste turned 31 in November. He celebrated by traveling to see his 8-year-old nephew's piano recital. The culture is in safe hands.
No matter if it's a rehearsal or an actual performance, Batiste and his band member play full out, laughing and having fun with each note they play.
Melissa Bunni Elian for The Undefeated
"I don't expect that jazz is always going to be on top like it was in the '20s, for example," said jazz pianist and bandleader Herbie Hancock. "The music is always evolving and constantly changing, and it's very difficult for a lot of listeners to keep up with that."
But he's optimistic about Batiste's work on The Late Show. "That experience is incredible because you're challenged in a lot of new ways, doing that type of TV show," Hancock said. "Because of the kind of talent he has and his experience in jazz, he's able to more easily adapt and include new ways of dealing with the music for that kind of show than if he had not had it."
As darkness began to settle over Manhattan, it was time for a show.
Batiste sprinted onstage to greet the show's live audience. Joined by Stay Human, they pumped up the crowd with James Brown's "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved" and an arrangement of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" modeled after Tito Puente's salsa-fied version.
One of Colbert's guests was writer and Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson, who was there to promote his new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. To introduce Isaacson, the band played an up-tempo rendition of "Oh! Didn't He Ramble," a New Orleans ditty from 1902 later popularized by Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong.
"I grew up with his whole family," Isaacson explained to Colbert. "The wonderful Batiste family of New Orleans." Isaacson gestured toward Batiste. "He's a great man."
When the interview concluded, Isaacson walked over for a hug, thrilled that Batiste had chosen to pay musical homage to their shared roots.
Later, Colbert said goodbye and the band exited. While the audience made its way to the lobby, stopping for pictures with cardboard cutouts of Colbert, Batiste huddled with the host for a post-mortem of the night's show.
The process of assembling and putting out a newspaper used to be known as the Daily Miracle. Making late-night television involves many of the same pressures related to accuracy, tone and intellect. On top of that, it's got to be funny, and it's done in front of a live audience.
No wonder The Late Show tapes smack in the middle of Broadway. With Colbert and Batiste at the helm, it's clear that's exactly where it belongs.
Source: https://andscape.com/features/backstage-at-the-late-show-with-jon-batiste/
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