Jon Batiste and The Dap-Kings perform on the main stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Sept. 22, 2018. Image: AFP/Eva Hambach
This year’s Grammy shortlists feature a number of bona fide pop megastars including Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and overnight sensation Olivia Rodrigo.
And then there is Jon Batiste.
The 35-year-old jazzman is the top nominee with 11 chances to take home a gold gramophone, but he’s not exactly a household name outside music circles.
The musical talent and artistic vision of Batiste, the Oscar-winning scion of a prominent New Orleans musical dynasty, have made him an industry mainstay for years, a red carpet regular with a prodigious body of work and an eye towards social justice.
He has recorded with legendary artists from Stevie Wonder to Prince to Willie Nelson, and is perhaps best known to the wider American public as the bandleader and musical director of Stephen Colbert’s popular late night comedy show.
He is also the creative director of Harlem’s National Jazz Museum, and last year took home an Oscar, Golden Globe and a BAFTA for co-composing the soundtrack of Pixar’s animated hit “Soul” with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The sleeper nominations frontrunner, who nabbed three Grammy nods in past years but has yet to win, will go up against flashy, big-budget releases from artists including Bieber and Rodrigo in major categories including Album and Record of the Year.
Batiste is also up for awards in fields spanning genre and medium, including R&B, jazz, American roots and contemporary classical. He is also in contention for Best Music Video.
“WOW!! Thank you God!! I love EVERYBODY! I’m so grateful to my collaborators and to my ancestors,” he tweeted after the nomination lists were released last fall.
‘Subconscious emotion’
Born on Nov. 11, 1986 in Louisiana, Batiste began playing drums and other percussion instruments as a child with his family, which includes a long line of gospel and jazz artists.
He switched to the piano as a pre-teen, releasing his debut album “Times in New Orleans” at age 17.
A classmate of Trombone Shorty, Batiste graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in 2004, going on to attend New York’s prestigious Juilliard school, where he completed both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in music.
He became a mainstay of the jazz community, releasing a number of recording projects and performing across the globe.
He and his band Stay Human secured the high-profile “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” gig starting in 2015, bringing his music to millions of eyes each weeknight.
In recent years, Batiste has emerged as a voice of social justice, notably taking part in June 2020’s Juneteenth celebration in Brooklyn as protests raged over the police murder of a Black man, George Floyd.
In March 2021, he released his eighth studio album “We Are,” which he has said he put together largely prior to the mass protests as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, but whose content offered prescient messages of hope and community.
A genre-spanning effort that fuses jazz with soul, hip-hop, pop and R&B, Batiste has called the record “a culmination of my life to this point.”
“You know the music is something that speaks to a subconscious emotion, and it felt like something that we all were feeling in 2020, and the music just brings it to the surface in a way that I think, nothing else can,” he told the online music magazine Atwood in 2021.
“It’s a universal language.” JB
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