A Musical Genius

A Reason To Smile

Dan Rather and Team Steady Mar 16

Credit: Getty Images

Ever since the Super Bowl, I have been thinking about Jon Batiste, the Louisiana native who wowed us with his version of the national anthem. There was something infectious about Batiste’s demeanor. He exuded joy, almost like he couldn’t believe he got to do what he did. What he did was perform the heck out of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In his hometown. On the biggest stage imaginable.

I’ll admit, I didn’t know much about Batiste, so I did a little digging, and what a story! The multi-hyphenate musical phenom is the easy choice to be this week’s reason to smile.

A singer-songwriter-musician-composer-bandleader, he plays drums, acoustic and electric guitar, saxophone, and melodica, but on the piano he is a virtuoso. He started taking classical piano lessons at age 11 and learned to meld classical with the jazz, blues, and gospel of his native Louisiana.

Batiste grew up in a noted musical family in and around a noted musical city, New Orleans. He played his first gig at the age of eight, with the Batiste Brothers Band. He released his first album at 17, before attending Julliard, where he earned a bachelor’s and master’s of music in jazz studies.

“I started learning just from my family and friends in the neighborhood. I didn’t think about music as a profession. It’s just something that we did. It was a way for us to gather. And then I started to learn all of these sounds, classical music. I could step into a world and I could escape and then I learned that you could take that world and you could shape it,” he said in an interview with Michelle Obama.

Batiste’s improvisational skills are transformational. He can take a classical piece like Beethoven’s Für Elise and turn it into blues or gospel, on the fly.

At the end of his seven-year tenure as the bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” he explained his process to the talk show host: “I would take the music that [Beethoven] had written, and I was in conversation with it. I would change things. I would add things to it. Then I realized that was very frowned upon … But it’s been 256 years. He is due for an update. Music, you mold it and you add to it. And it won’t revoke anything that exists. It’s only adding to the continuum of human creativity.”

Batiste also writes and performs original music, for which he has won multiple Grammys and an Oscar. You can almost feel his irrepressible spirit in his song “Freedom.”

Michelle and Barack Obama recognized Batiste’s genius and executive-produced “American Symphony,” a documentary chronicling the composition of his first symphony while his wife, Suleika Jaouad, battled a recurrence of leukemia. She describes her disease as chronic.

If you want to see him perform live, Batiste is starting a U.S. and European tour in April. He is an incredible American story.