Kenner, LA · jazz · soul

Jon Batiste

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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 Metairie, Louisiana, and grew up nearby in Kenner. He belongs to the Batiste family, a New Orleans musical dynasty that includes Lionel Batiste of the Treme Brass Band, Milton Batiste of the Olympia Brass Band and Russell Batiste Jr. He began on percussion at eight, playing in the family's Batiste Brothers Band, before switching to piano at eleven.

He attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts alongside Trombone Shorty and released his debut album, Times in New Orleans, at seventeen. He then trained at Juilliard, earning a bachelor's degree in 2008 and a master's in 2011, both in jazz studies, performing as a student at venues including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall.

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. Live, he tends toward high-energy, loosely structured performances that can leave the stage entirely.

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. He has also served as music director of The Atlantic and creative director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

He co-composed the jazz score for the animated film Soul, work that won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Grammy shared with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. His album We Are won the Grammy for Album of the Year, one of eight Grammys he has won from twenty-five nominations. He has since appeared in the documentary American Symphony and played Billy Preston in the film Saturday Night, also composing its score.

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