OSCAR AND GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING COMPOSER; MUSICAL DIRECTOR, THE ATLANTIC; CO-ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, THE NATIONAL JAZZ MUSEUM
Jon Batiste is an American virtuoso pianist, bandleader, composer, record producer, educator and actor. As a teenager, he began self-producing and releasing his music on the internet, as well as performing internationally. At the 2022 Grammy Awards, Batiste was the night's biggest winner, taking home five awards including Album of the Year for We Are. Batiste also won best American roots performance, best American roots song, best score soundtrack for visual media, and best music video for "Freedom." He was also nominated for 6 other awards.
Batiste's major label debut “Hollywood Africans” was nominated for a Grammy award for Best American Roots Performance in 2019 and, along with his band Stay Human, he is featured nightly on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. His music is featured in the Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning 2020 Disney Pixar film Soul, and his composing and songwriting will be featured in his large-scale, genre-melding symphonic work “American Symphony,” set to be performed at Carnegie Hall in 2021.
Born into a long lineage of Louisiana musicians, Batiste received both his undergraduate and master's degrees in piano from the Juilliard School. He is currently the Music Director of The Atlantic, the Co-Artistic Director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and is on the board of Sing For Hope.
A Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, Jon balances a demanding performance schedule—which often includes his signature ‘love riot’ street parades—with public speaking engagements, master classes, brand partnerships, and acting roles. He played himself on the HBO series Tremé and appeared in director Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer.
Jon has been featured in ad campaigns for Chase Bank, the Apple Watch, Lincoln Continental, and numerous fashion brands including Coach, Polo Ralph Lauren Black Label, Frye, Kate Spade, Jack Spade Barneys, Nordstrom, and H&M. He has worked with, among others, Bruce Weber and Annie Leibowitz and his personal style has been profiled in numerous fashion publications including GQ, Vanity Fair, CR Fashion Book, Esquire, and Vogue.
Jon is committed to the education and mentorship of young musicians. He has led his own Social Music Residency and Mentoring Program sponsored by Chase, as well as master classes throughout the world. He has also led several cultural exchanges, beginning in 2006, while still a teen, with the Netherlands Trust, which brought students from the USA and Holland to perform with him at both The Royal Concert Gebouw and Carnegie Hall.
Topics:
-
"If we want to change anything in the world, music is going to be our jumping off point." There's always been a sound for every movement in history. That's the idea of what Social Music can be: the soundtrack and the energy of people who go out and try to love more. Bringing together people who would never come together otherwise is a means of shedding light on the fact that we are all the same more than we are different. And if more people came together like this, even to just sing and dance, it would make all of these things that we're facing socially in the world a lot better. Batiste discusses how people of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds can be separated by things on the surface, but actually, everybody's pretty much the same.
-
Jon Batiste takes us on a musical journey, educating us through a chronological order of musical origins. From the sound of the drum circle in Africa to the bluegrass played in the Appalachians, Jonathan uses his incredible talent to demonstrate the historical significance of black music in American history—even the role it plays today.
-
In this talk, Jon guides us in a review through talk-singing-listening to the resilient properties of music and how different kinds of music have evolved and have kept us human by connecting us with one another and ourselves through time. Jon will explore some of humankind's most potent genres and hear/analyze music that has preserved us through his own short musical performances and examples. Jon Batiste will cover various genres including: Sorrow songs, Freedom songs, Work songs, Blues, Jubilee songs, Gospel, Rap, Jazz, and Sacred Songs
Twitter: @JonBatiste
Instagram: @jonbatiste