Born on November 11, 1986, in Metairie, Louisiana, Jon Batiste is known for his rousing singing voice, versatile and dynamic piano playing, and for the handful of Grammy Awards he received in 2022 for his album We Are.
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Batiste was also, until recently, the band leader for the Stephen Colbert-led late-night show on CBS. But he has since stepped away from the show for the sake of his burgeoning solo career. Batiste, who made his bones early on in New Orleans, is an example of the city’s music culture. He walks with it in his steps down to the clothes he wears.
Below, we will dive into the thoughts and musings of Batiste, what he has to say about life and love, his craft, and the world at large. These are the 20 best Jon Batiste quotes.
1. “In a live performance, it’s a collaboration with the audience; you ride the ebb and flow of the crowd’s energy. On television, you don’t have that.”
2. “Whatever I do with music, I try to make it align deeply with the values and principles of who I am and what I believe the purpose of my life is.”
3. “I’m from Kenner, Louisiana, where music is played for every occasion in life. There’s music for being born, there’s music for dying… It’s just natural. Families get really good because they play a lot together.”
4. “Earliest musical memory is probably being scared stiff with my family’s band as a youngster on stage playing the conga drums.”
5. “The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.”
6. “I have seven uncles, and my dad played bass, they had a band together, that was the family band. And of course, as the cousins got older, including myself, we joined a family band. All the cousins played. That’s my heritage.”
7. “We played Carnegie Hall, and that was one time where I felt… Carnegie Hall as a legendary, very venerable place to perform. I’d never heard of anyone going into the Hall and kind of standing on the seats and playing throughout the aisles and having the audience stand on the seats. So when we did that in 2013, even for me it was a shock.”
8. “There were so many people after that first ‘Colbert Report’ interview that were impressed by the synergy we had during the interview. People everywhere we’d go would say, ‘You should be the bandleader; it would be great for jazz. It would be great for the music.’ But I was completely against it.”
9. “I think it’s important for people to stay human and remember that genuine human connection is more fulfilling than anything that technology has to offer. We all have it within us, and music is something that can bring that out of us.”
10. “My whole way of looking at entertainment and audience engagement—and my ability to go from one genre to another—comes from my experience in New Orleans.”
11. “My sense of style is influenced by how I feel. I want to express myself because they see you before they hear you. You want to come on stage, and what you look like should represent the song you are playing or the set you are about to play or the message in your music.”
12. “Jazz has a tradition that has enriched the culture in America. The intellectualism of it does nothing but make you think on a higher level and make you a better person if you engage in the music and let it do what it does when it is played at its highest level.”
13. “When the Beatles wrote ‘Paperback Writer,’ it couldn’t have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it’s not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.”
14. “With so many ways to communicate at our disposal, we must not forget the transformative power of a live music experience and genuine human exchange.”
15. “There’s a tradition—in New Orleans, it still exists—where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.”
16. “Imagine if you grew up in a place where your lineage was there for a hundred years, and part of the culture was to play music 50 percent of the time. You’d probably have a lot of musicians in your family too.”
17. “Early American music and early folk music, before the record became popular and before there were pop stars and before there were venues made to present music where people bought tickets, people played music in the community, and it was much more part of a fabric of everyday life. I call that music ‘root music.'”
18. “The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it’s still jazz.”
19. “I’m always about trying to fill a need with what I do in my artistry. There is definitely a need in the performing arts world for a movement to come along that seriously connects with a next generation audience while still maintaining the timeless artistic objectives present throughout the history of the American music tradition.”
20. “You can’t hate the person next to you when you’re laughing and dancing together.”
Photo by Kristy Sparow/Getty Images for Global Citizen
