Jon Batiste has got the whole wide music world in his hands

Nothing is simple when it comes to Jon Batiste, a pianist, television personality, New Orleans musical scion and jazz-R&B-classical savant.

He spent seven years as the smiling, melodica-toting TV bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, yet he found some of his widest acclaim for solemn protest performances in Brooklyn after the murder of George Floyd.

He beat Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish for album of the year at the Grammys in 2022, despite his We Are having just a fraction of their sales — and then presented American Symphony, a Walt Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums at Carnegie Hall.

Now comes Batiste’s most commercial project yet: World Music Radio, an album with guest appearances by Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne and K-pop girl group NewJeans, made with a team of producers behind hits for artists such as Justin Bieber and Drake, with tightly woven hooks that were engineered to fit on any Top 40-style streaming playlist.

But, of course, World Music Radio, which comes out August 18, is no standard pop release. It’s also a fantastical concept album that challenges music’s provincial genre borders, with a message of open-armed inclusivity for a fractured political era. The album’s central character, a timeless interstellar being named Billy Bob Bo Bob, curates a potpourri of the far-flung musical languages of Earth and transmits it to the cosmos with chuckling, Daddy-O commentary, like Doctor Who crossed with Wolfman Jack.

“He’s a DJ, he’s a griot, he’s a storyteller, he’s a unifier, he’s a rebel,” Batiste said, describing the character of Billy Bob Bo Bob. “He’s a disrupter.”

That’s also as good an encapsulation as any of the 36-year-old Batiste himself, who can’t easily be pinned down to any single role, or genre, or corner of the music market.

In his own eccentric way, World Music Radio is Batiste’s interpretation of what mainstream pop is or should be, in which high-energy electronic dance beats coexist with reggae, Afropop and old-fashioned piano torch ballads. Be Who You Are, the first single, has lyrics in English, Spanish and Korean, and its high-tech, partially animated music video, produced through a brand deal with Coke, features Batiste, Latin pop star Camilo, rapper JID and members of NewJeans all vibing alongside one another.

Yet, in discussing the album, Batiste was almost totally cerebral, speaking in long, eloquent, practically unsummarisable paragraphs about his mental and creative processes. The album’s origin, he said, was partly philosophical, as he mused on the connections and divergences between “the horrendous idea of what we call ‘world music’” — local traditions viewed through a condescending Western lens — “and the narrow diameter of what’s considered popular music.”

“So then, world music,” Batiste added, shifting professorially on the living room sofa of his airy and immaculate Brooklyn brownstone. “What if we could re-imagine that term? What if we could reinvent? What if we could use it as a prompt to expand the diameter of popular music?”

As Batiste sees it, World Music Radio is the culmination of a career that has long snaked through supposedly disparate traditions and audiences.

Batiste grew up in Kenner, Louisiana, part of a family with deep musical roots in New Orleans, and he spent his teenage years playing late-night gigs in the French Quarter with his friend Trombone Shorty, then rushing to high school classes in the morning. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard and became a fixture around New York with his band Stay Human, especially for what he called “love riots”: spontaneous, Pied Piper-like performances of You Are My Sunshine or Lady Gaga songs that took place on the street or in the subway, interrupting the daily grind with flashes of joy.

At the same time, with his 2013 album Social Music, he began to develop a brand of activism that emphasized music’s power to find common ground amid ever-widening political polarization.

“Inclusive is not even the right word,” Batiste said of his approach. “It’s more, OK, we’re coexisting as human beings on Earth. We’re not a monolith. But underneath it all, we’re the same. That’s not something that can be interpreted in the binary climate that we’re in now.”

In 2015, Batiste and Stay Human became the house band on Colbert’s new CBS show, where Batiste performed comedic musical skits but had little outlet to express his broader political or social views. And, with more than 200 shows a year, he also couldn’t tour — something that, incredibly, Batiste has never done as a headlining act.

We Are, which was begun in late 2019 and completed the next year at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, became Batiste’s vehicle for protest and for communicating the wider social ambitions of his music. Although the album had barely registered in the marketplace, Batiste became the surprise top nominee for the 64th annual Grammy Awards, getting eight nods for We Are and three more for the movie soundtrack Soul. (The score for Soul also won Batiste, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross an Oscar.)

At the same time, Batiste’s longtime partner, Suleika Jaouad, had spent years struggling with cancer and writing about it in The New York Times. The day the Grammy nominations were announced, Jaouad began a round of chemotherapy. “At certain points of her treatment,” Batiste said, “her immune system was so compromised that we couldn’t be in the same room.”

They married last year, and after a bone-marrow transplant, Jaouad’s health has improved enough that they recently took a vacation in Europe. “A major, major milestone,” Batiste said.

Asked about his commercial hopes for World Music Radio, Batiste was typically circuitous and nuanced, saying that on one hand, he wants to compete with stars such as Taylor Swift for top chart positions, but he also recognizes that his take on popular culture is more conceptual and abstract. He was most straightforward in saying he couldn’t wait to head out on tour.

He seems most prepared for any reaction to his social commentary on the album. “Love Black folks and white folks,” Batiste sings on Be Who You Are. “My Asians, my Africans, my Afro-Eurasian, Republican or Democrat.”

Even that simple message of openness and acceptance is relatively rare in an era when many pop stars shrink away from any social commentary at all, out of fear of alienating part of their audience and sacrificing clicks. It’s a risk Batiste is determined to take.

“To say I love everybody, including Republicans — as a Black guy, I don’t know how that could go,” he said. “That shouldn’t be something that’s frowned upon or looked at in a way that probably to some seems like, ‘Oh, he’s not really clear on what’s important.’”

“It’s radical today to love everybody,” he added. “We are in a time that there’s more of a pressure to make people into the other, and to dehumanize them in the process. But the act of removing a certain baseline of humanity in how we approach living amongst each other, that should be radical. That should be the thing that is disruptive.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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