The Art of Staying Human, Staying Musical

When last we caught high-profile musician/bandleader/inspirational public figure Jon Batiste in town, it was an epic pop-up occasion at the Arlington Theatre. On short notice, Batiste, who plays the Santa Barbara Bowl on Friday, August 9, appeared as part of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) in February, with a screening of the documentary American Symphony and a post-screening Q&A with SBIFF head Roger Durling. The unusually intimate doc, directed by Matthew Heineman, captures the peaks and valleys of a period in Batiste’s life while he was working on his multi-genre American Symphony, basking in the Grammy glory for his album We Are while also dealing with his wife Suleika Jaouad’s struggles with leukemia.

As Batiste said then, the film “was a dance and an improvisation between Matt and us [Batiste and his wife]. You can’t plan on what was going to happen. You process it just by living — upward projection. Move, move, move!”

Staying on the move is a natural state for Batiste. He made his local debut at UCSB’s Campbell Hall in 2019, while still the prominent leader of the band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — his group Stay Human, to be precise. Five years later, after scooping up Grammy and Oscar trophies, awards earmarked for his album We Are and his score (along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) for the film Soul, Batiste heads up the hill to the Bowl, on tour to promote last year’s concept album World Music Radio. The concert is a show with jazz in its bone structure.

Jazz plays a strong role in Batiste’s complex and wide-ranging musical identity, tapped in his lineage in an influential New Orleans musical family and later tinged by studies at Juilliard and connections with such jazz-world notables as Wynton Marsalis. But there’s much more to his musical makeup. He has always maintained bold links to R&B/soul, pop, and Caribbean colors (also linked to his New Orleans heritage), and collaborations with Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne, and Kenny G.

His ambitious American Symphony, premiering at Carnegie Hall, was an innately eclectic experiment that weaves together musical forces from many cultural corners — an idealistic tapestry of Batiste’s devising. In an interview with Forbes, Batiste addressed his holistic view of how different genres and musical cultures can seamlessly integrate, a running theme of World Music Radio. “We always talk about improvisation,” he noted, “and it really is one of the only forms of music that exemplifies the American experiment putting all these different cultures into one country and coexisting and trying to create beautiful music together.”

As an outspoken activist and Christian, Batiste underscores the messages conveyed in his life and through the vehicle of music. In his SBIFF appearance, Batiste took a philosophical overview of the positive and challenging twists in his recent life, as evidenced in the documentary. “I came to realize that we all go through these things,” he said. “There are great times, there are rough times, but it’s all time.”

Jon Batiste performs at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Friday, August 9, at 7 p.m. See sbbowl.com.