Kenner, LA · jazz · soul

Jon Batiste

2 upcoming festivals

New Orleans piano polymath who moves between jazz standards, gospel, and pop without changing his grin — Grammy-stacked joy as a performance style.

Jon Batiste was born in 1986 in Kenner, Louisiana, into a New Orleans musical family, and trained at Juilliard. He plays piano and melodica, and leads the band Stay Human, with whom he served as bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for several years.

His work moves between jazz, gospel, R&B and pop, and he has drawn on street parades and second-line traditions as readily as on the standards repertoire. He co-composed the jazz music for the animated film Soul, and his album We Are won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Live, he tends toward high-energy, loosely structured performances that can leave the stage entirely.

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