If one thing about this weekend’s 66th annual Grammys look acquainted to you, credit score Jon Batiste and his armful of nominations. Similar goes for March 10’s Oscars ceremony.

Within the run-up to the 2024 Grammys, the New Orleans native has once more bolstered his Technicolor model of R&B jazz fusion with gospel, hip-hop, dancehall and past for his latest launch, 2023’s “World Music Radio.” For that, the keyboardist-composer is nominated for track of the yr (“Butterfly”), document of the yr (“Worship”), album of the yr (“World Music Radio”), finest jazz efficiency (“Motion 18′ (Heroes)” and finest American roots efficiency (“Butterfly”). For his sixth nomination this yr, Batiste can also be Grammy-recognized for his featured look on Lana Del Rey’s most up-to-date album, sharing a finest pop duo/group efficiency nomination for “Sweet Necklace.”

So far as the March 10 Oscar ceremony, Batiste is represented with a finest unique track nomination for “It By no means Went Away” from his documentary “American Symphony,” a movie largely devoted to his spouse, creator Suleika Jaouad, their journey from childhood friendship to marriage, and her wrenching well being points together with leukemia.

Batiste’s joyful siege on this yr’s Grammys and Academy Awards is just like his run on the sixty fourth annual Grammys in 2022 when he was nominated in 11 classes and received 5, together with a contented upset when album of the yr went to 2021’s grooving epic “We Are.” In the meantime, for the 2020 animated movie “Soul,” Batiste and firm received the Academy Award for composing music with Trent Reznor and Atticus Rossfor finest unique rating (the “Soul” trio additionally received a Golden Globe).

Remind him that he’s reliving his latest Grammy and Oscar victories, and an acceptance of his work in a essential and public style, and his first phrase is “Wow.”

“It’s a matter of staying centered and disciplined whereas following the concepts you had within the first place, since you by no means know the place one thing’s going to finish up,” says Batiste throughout a mid-afternoon telephone name.

“We didn’t know the place that movie (“American Symphony”) would wind up, or that this album (“World Music Radio”) would make sense to folks following an 11-Grammy-nominated, Finest Album of the 12 months document.”

On a good deeper, extra private degree, Batiste’s normal upbeat tone lowers however an octave when talking about his spouse’s potential fates. “We didn’t know that my spouse would make it to the top of the movie or what its finish could be, or if there even could be a movie on condition that we didn’t have funding to start out it or end it,” he says. “The place we’re in now could be once more a testomony to that divine spark of inspiration actually having a which means. That’s one thing you must belief, even when it doesn’t make sense.”

Whereas he’s by no means wanted the validation of awards, it’s curious to marvel if the success of “We Are” and its sonic universality — after recordings just like the grooving gumbo soul of 2005’s “Instances in New Orleans,” the free jazz of 2014’s “The Course of” with Chad Smith and Invoice Laswell and his meditations on the compositions of John Lewis and Thelonious Monk — didn’t open the doorways to the multi-flavored “World Music Radio.”

“Which will have been a thought, that we had been each attempting to satisfy expectations on, and likewise not be a prisoner of ‘We Are’ in the beginning of the ‘World Music Radio’ course of,” says Batiste. “However as soon as the Billy Bob Bo narrative got here into play, we knew that we had been treading on territory that was exterior of the norm.”

Batiste’s introduction of the fictional, interstellar Billy Bob Bo entity and a cosmos-leaping conceptualism to the “inside backbone” of “World Music Radio” took that one world right into a universe of many totally different worlds, and supplied listeners “one thing not so simply understood on the floor, and provides folks one thing to sink their enamel into,” he says. “With repeated listens, you would uncover one thing new each time.”

And the way is Billy Bob Bo, the thematic middle of Batiste’s new album, doing at current?

“Billy Bob is someplace in one other galaxy broadcasting ‘World Music Radio’ to some extraterrestrials and recruiting new members into the vibe machine neighborhood,” says Batiste with amusing. “The factor that he did when he got here to me was present me the best way. I had this album 9 months into the method with a imaginative and prescient of limitless creativity and genre-less music that was experimental, however might hearken to, even when I knew nothing concerning the genres being referenced.”

Batiste knew that such a protean very best was arduous to drag off. However in his thoughts, Billy Bob Bo gave him hope. “He turned my information, and this epiphany second with him didn’t actually resonate till the final quarter of recording, sequencing the document and including these interludes and his expressions. All of the sudden it was revealed: that’s what ‘World Music Radio’ was ready for. We even refined his narrative by bringing on Wolfgang – the inventive company – to construct a script and storyboard as if we had been making a film.”

Batiste mentions that lots of the songs on “World Music Radio” predate the music of “We Are,” whereas a number of tracks got here throughout the time period after the “whirlwind” of leaving “The Late Present with Stephen Colbert,” a CBS community bandleader gig he held for seven years. “The final half of the brand new album comes from that one month of my inventive spark being reignited, that very same month at Shangri-La when Lana and I captured ‘Sweet Necklace,’ organically, simply sitting across the piano.”

“That’s one actually inventive month within the Jon Batiste canon,” says the music-maker within the third individual.
 
That is the place “Butterfly” from “World Music Radio” and “It By no means Went Away” from the “American Symphony” documentary — each spare piano ballads about his spouse, co-written with the legendary Dan Wilson — come into play.

Contemplating the intimacy of each “Butterfly” and “It By no means Went Away,” ballads that talk, respectively, to the fragility of existence and the ways in which love certainly outlasts mortality, it’s curious that Batiste would entrust components of his marriage and storytelling to a different author, longtime hitmaker Dan Wilson (Semisonic, Mitski, Taylor Swift, Dixie Chicks).

“Dan is an unimaginable collaborator as a result of he’s somebody who listens to the intention of the artist, and nearly capabilities as a track therapist,” says Batiste. “We had conversations that result in discoveries, musical and private. Issues we shared and lived in parallel. Discovering that frequent floor and protected house allowed for these songs to pour out.”

Batiste will get quiet when he notes that “It By no means Went Away” had its personal “North Star,” on condition that “American Symphony” director Matthew Heineman got here to him the day earlier than their documentary’s premiere on the Telluride Movie Pageant and needed a brand new ending. “We found that there wanted to be one thing else visually, and a track that acted as a sonic end result, and blended into the rating and the symphony I had composed and carried out.”

Batiste had been writing and taking part in what he referred to as “lullabies” for his spouse, Suleika, throughout the worst moments of her a number of well being scares and continued hospitalizations.

“Butterfly” got here from these lullaby house periods. So did “It By no means Went Away.”

“These songs come from the supply of that have,” Batiste says of their sparse, somnolent association and delicate however stark melodicism — a sound removed from his normal funky sonic complexity.

“Lullabies are the only type of melody,” he says. “Even the phrase ‘lull’ speaks to goals and the subconsciousness, the language of the invisible. One thing about that requires meditative simplicity. So from me writing these melodies that crammed my spouse’s hospital room… that guided the order of those two songs being so easy. You couldn’t take it too removed from the supply materials with out dropping its feeling.”

Batiste is a spiritually guided man born right into a musical, church-going household in New Orleans that simply occurred to be practising Catholics. Understanding that he has not misplaced his faith, I ask the keyboardist-composer about certainly one of “It By no means Went Away’s” central lyrics, the road that goes, “Whenever you plan, God laughs / Thought I used to be sizzling / Obtained a detour alongside the best way.” 

Trying pragmatically at his married life and the work that each he and his spouse have created, Batiste muses, “We now have all of these items that we expect we’re going to do, after which… each the highs and the lows of the life are available in and disrupt that. God was taking a look at these plans you had made, all these belongings you envisioned doing, and laughed – not antagonistically, however within the sense of seeing the larger image. You get a plan. And you then get a analysis, or you get 11 Grammy nominations – these two issues got here on the identical day, thoughts you. The irony and the polarity of each of these realizations occurring directly is so quick and so jarring that it’s humorous. You possibly can assume that you’re smart as you need, however you’ll be able to’t outsmart that.”

Batiste remembers a optimistic letter that Jaouad obtained proper after she revealed her 2021 autobiography, “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted,” a letter that spoke of receiving hope from the creator in appreciation of her good and poignant prose. “However you’ll be able to’t be ‘Princeton’ about your religion was the message behind the letter. You possibly can assume you’re good, however at a sure level, nothing can change the fact of the way you’re residing; that notion actually caught with each of us.”

Batiste has lengthy referred to his general sound as “social music,” primarily based on its energetic conversational really feel and its connection to New Orleans’ convivial scene of music in neighborhood parlors and backyards. That light repose works for the sunny, common funk of “We Are” and “World Music Radio.” However does that time period essentially match the insular intimacy of “Butterfly” and “It By no means Went Away?”

The keyboardist believes that, as artists, there are however two or three concepts that outline what one does, and that get refined all through your inventive life. “You remake these throughout time as you come to have better understanding,” he says. “Excited about ‘Hollywood Africans,’ my second album that I did with T Bone Burnett, we went into an empty church in New Orleans, with only a piano and a microphone. That’s one zone of my expression: a house base. The thought of ‘social music’ is yet one more zone. The relate to one another extra when one turns into a message pushed medium, slightly than a sonic one.”

Contemplating that his spouse is the centerpiece of each his Grammy-nominated “Butterfly” and his Oscar-nominated “It By no means Went Away,” is it potential that Suleika Jaouad would come and get her flowers on stage if her husband received both totem? Or each?

“I used to be fascinated about, who ought to — if we had been so lucky to win — give the speech,” Batiste says, laughing. “Watch and see. That might be a fantastic factor if she did that. There was a lot that we missed out on within the final yr together with once I hit the Grammys or had a few of the performances that I had, she couldn’t be there. This yr, nonetheless, she is ready to attend, so we’re in a contented full-circle second.”