“It Was a Test of My Mettle. Am I Really About What I Say I'm About?”: A Conversation with Late Show Band Leader Jon Batiste

This week, Inside the Hive welcomes special guest Jon Batiste, leader of the Stay Human Band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Hot off his Golden Globe win for his work on the score of Pixar’s Soul, Batiste's latest album, We Are, represents a vivid turn from straight jazz into a joyful, danceable pop and neo-soul. It's also a bold declaration of conscience: catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter movement of last summer, when he rallied protestors with an ad hoc street band, Batiste wanted to deliver a personal statement on his own experience as a Black man in America. “We have to hold ourselves accountable to the things that we profess to believe,” he says. 

Batiste collaborated with 200 musicians, producers, and friends, including Quincy Jones, Mavis Staples, and even author Zadie Smith, with whom he held regular singing sessions over Zoom at the height of the pandemic. Here he recounts his own musical evolution, from Louisiana, where he grew up in a storied musical family, to New York, where he studied jazz piano at Juilliard and later developed what he’s come to call “social music,” a sound that draws on, in addition to New Orleans jazz, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Wu Tang Clan and even Bjork to find a common humanity in a time of division.