Jon Batiste Blueses Up Beethoven: “It’s Been 250-Plus Years. It Needed an Update.”

Chris Wallace may not be the most obvious artistic muse, but Grammy-winner Jon Batiste owes some credit to the veteran newsman for inspiring his latest musical experiment.

He turned to the piano and began playing Beethoven’s Für Elise, gradually infusing it with blue notes and gospel chords. The result was a joyful, soulful, century-spanning alchemy that caused Batiste to laugh and Wallace to enthuse, “That is amazing.”

Batiste said he was just “messing around.” But the clip went viral (perhaps one of all too few to do so on Wallace’s show) proving that there was an appetite for the fusion of traditions Batiste had demonstrated. “Messing around” turned into a full album, Beethoven’s Blues (out Nov. 15), in which he boldly reinterprets sacrosanct melodies by the great German composer, including “Ode to Joy” and the “Moonlight” and “Waldstein” sonatas. 

In a wide-ranging conversation with THR just two days after the presidential election, Batiste shared his thoughts on the “the resilience of the human spirit,” his enduring belief in the uniting power of music and his dream collaboration with Mr. Rogers.

I want to start with what’s on everybody’s mind right now. I’m curious, given that your work celebrates this country’s cultural diversity, how you’re making sense of the results of this week’s divisive election.

Well, I think that the people have the power always. What the people decide — whether it’s through voting or not voting — creates the context, but we still have the power moving forward. The context oftentimes could be better. But when I wrote [the orchestral piece] American Symphony [which includes elements of jazz, blues, classical, folk, Latin and Native American musical traditions], what I was thinking about was how the greatest transformations in this country have come from people who were at the bottom, not the people in in in power. The people who are at the bottom deciding that their humanity and that of the generations to come are of too much value to allow for them to be dismantled by a system of oppression. So I think that however that manifests over the next administration is the stuff history is made of. 

It’s obviously too soon to tell. But how do you think this new era will affect the kind of work that you want to put out in the world.

I’m always going to find a way. You can do so much when you understand that within you, you have this life force that allows for you to create so much of your reality, in collaboration with the Almighty. Everything around you can be falling apart, or it can be glorious, but it’s what’s within you that is the most important thing to make sure that you have a grip on in order to be able to do your thing in the outside world. Because then you’ll find a way. You know how they say necessity is the mother of invention? It’s about the resilience of the human spirit and the will of people to make things happen when everybody thought there was no way. 

Your latest project, Beethoven Blues, bridges not only cultural chasms, but countries and centuries. Why Beethoven?

It’s been 250-plus years. It was due for an update. Think about how much that’s in the public domain that is a part of our communal memory, our shared reality, that is duly revered but in equal parts stifling when it comes to European classical music. First, there’s this idea of what’s to be valued in art — what’s to be put on a higher plane of value versus what’s to be looked at as more pedestrian. There’s a cultural context in terms of who’s creating the art and what they would have wanted, and then there’s what that culture represents to the rest of the world, and the question of how we engage with that. There’s a class [element to that]. And where I find all of that to be amiss is that the origins of [jazz and classical] are much more similar [than most people realize]. Jazz music has a lot of spontaneous composition, and early classical music also had a lot of spontaneous composition, yet its contemporary reality is so far away from that that you would imagine that jazz and classical music could never come together. And I find it to be a great thing that you can update it if you have the language and the ability and the craft to put them together. So, that’s why I thought, why not do it? 

Why do you think that the tradition of improvisation — or as you put it, spontaneous composition — was lost in classical music?

Well, I think that a lot of it has to do with our reluctance to embrace musical values that come from marginalized cultures. Moreso than that, it’s a matter of scribesmanship. Classical music is written. Even after Bach is gone, we can discover his multitude of scores. There’s a specificity to the written word. But with a lot of the African diasporic traditions, it’s passed on through an oral tradition. And with the scribesmanship of those traditions is not as acutely documented as in classical music. So there’s an authority that comes when something is written, because it allows for people to think: Oh, I don’t even have to hear the recordings — he wrote it right here. So then people start to try to own the thing that’s written, when maybe that was just what he wrote on a Tuesday, and on a Wednesday it would be a different story. So then people start to say, well, what you wrote, that’s the thing that it has to be every time. But humans change their mind all the time. And cultural context changes, and we evolve, and instruments evolve and technology evolves. So why wouldn’t the music evolve? We almost have to reverse-mythologize many of our greatest cultural contributions and recontextualize them in contemporary culture, so they can exist as they truly are.

Beethoven was famously a great improviser. What do you think he would have made of the reverence with which his music is most often presented, as if it were a museum piece not to be altered? 

We don’t have recordings of Beethoven playing his music. We know he was an incredibly spontaneous composer, as well as all the things we know and love about him. When he was playing and composing, gospel music, hip hop, soul, blues — all these incredible musical innovations — didn’t exist yet. If he was around the day, who’s to say he wouldn’t incorporate those elements, or shift the way that he performs the score every single time.

In American Symphony, there’s a scene in which you visit your old piano teacher William Dahglian on New York’s Upper West side. You played some Beethoven for him and he critiqued your playing firmly, unaffected by your fame and success. First, how humbling was that? And second, did you consult with him on Beethoven’s Blues?

Yes. I went to see him before, and he told me that there’s a real magic in my playing, a rare gift, but that I have to be careful, because I had just finished touring, and he says, “You’re playing a lot, and I’ve seen people with a rare gift lose it when it becomes rote. It becomes an exercise to please the crowd.” So he mentioned that, and that was really great. He didn’t produce this record in the traditional sense, or sit in the studio and teach me as I’m playing, but just the conversations prior to going in to record it, and me sharing with him the vision of it, and our talking about how I could take what it is in my playing that’s so unique and singular to me and apply it to the classics — he was such a part of it. And then after I spoke with him, I recorded the album at my house in two days.

When you played your version of Für Elise on Chris Wallace’s show, you said you were just “messing around.” But was it entirely spur-of-the-moment?

For years, I’ve had this approach of being in conversation with the classical composers that I would learn in my piano lessons. I would take the songs, and sometimes later that night, I’d be playing them at the Maple Leaf bar in New Orleans, yeah, and I would be melding them into the set that I was playing, and reimagining them in that way. So it there’s always been a natural cross-pollination of influences and genres and mentors. 

Why do you think the Fur Elise clip resonated the way it did? 

I don’t know for sure, but it speaks to something that we all know to be true, but nobody had said yet. It’s the type of thing that’s latent in the air but once it’s verbalized, everyone’s like, Oh yeah! And I’m not just talking about musically. There’s something about the image of Beethoven being played in this way at this time, by these people. There’s a lot of layers to what’s happening. 

If you could jam with any three musicians in history who are no longer among us, who comes to mind?

Wow, wow. Wow. [Long pause]. Wait a minute, that’s incredible. Let me see. Let’s see. Let’s see. I think Louis Armstrong has definitely got to be one of them, because he’s so misunderstood as this sort of happy guy that was great at jazz when he really set the tone for any contemporary musical expression as we know it. That would be amazing to do something with him.

Anyone else?

You know who I’d want to collab with? Mr. Rogers.

Really? Well, he was a great piano player…

Yeah. And I think it would be amazing to to build a show with Mister Rogers for the world as it is today. We’d write songs together, and then he and I would host it together. 

What other unexpected musical experiments can we expect from you in coming years? What other divides have you yet to cross? 

I’m looking forward to bridging the gap between culture and technology. Everybody’s talking about AI, and infusing it with a cultural perspective as we transition our mythology into the digital space more and more. I think that there’s a real need for that to happen.

Doesn’t that scare you, the musical mimicry of generative AI? 

Nothing scares me. Whatever is the darkest and most relentless force against your wellbeing is also the greatest opportunity for transformation.