J on Batiste had never played the fiddle or mandolin before. But once a melody gets stuck in his head, he has to pick up an instrument and follow the rhythm. This happened while he was recording his ninth studio album, “Big Money,” a lean, acoustic-filled spin on roots music. He found himself singing a folk tune—“Dandelions and pickled vegetables/Swim in the ocean/What’s left of her”—and wondering how to make it work.
“I started to feel like there was this sound growing out of the dirt and becoming a song,” he explains. Ultimately, the fiddle and mandolin felt like the perfect backdrop for lyrics about climate destruction. Although, Batiste says, “bluegrass is not necessarily considered to be Black music,” he points to “Boil Them Cabbage Down,” one of the oldest known fiddle songs, which is believed to have originated in Niger. (It was later popularized by white folk singers in the early 1900s.) Batiste quickly learned the song’s fiddle riff, worked it into his recording and titled the track “Petrichor,” named after the earthy scent in the air after it rains.
The New Orleans musician, 38, has been widely recognized as a jazz traditionalist, late-night bandleader, Grammy- and Oscar-winning pop collaborator and film composer but never as a folk singer. “Big Money” is a straightforward statement record about blues as a foundational element of Americana, much less subtle than his 2024 release, “Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1),” a soft, piano-driven symphony. Batiste describes “Big Money” as “explicitly drenched in blues,” a continuation of his ongoing effort to showcase some of the world’s most popular genres as traditionally Black musical expressions. The album is also part of a larger cultural reclamation by artists such as Rissi Palmer, Shaboozey and Beyoncé, who tapped Batiste to co-write and co-produce a track for her country album, “Cowboy Carter.” “We’re being forthright about the identity and origin of those sounds,” he says. “We can’t separate those sounds from where they come from.”
Even as he dips into the past, Batiste is clear that his artistic work—which he’s labeled “social music” since the start of his career—always speaks to contemporary strains. Lately, this means tackling human rights violations, environmental collapse and a rising sense of nihilism around capitalism, a message he conveys handily on the album’s celebratory title track, over a playful, handclapped beat: “Everybody’s chasing that big, big money.”
“It’s funny watching the response of folks when we play a song like ‘Big Money’ or ‘Petrichor,’ about the environment, and the lyrics are so direct. It charges the air. I like that,” Batiste says, speaking from a Las Vegas hotel amid a nationwide tour for the album. “It’ll be an audience where you’d think they wouldn’t necessarily get on board. But it’s almost like magic, the way the rhythm and the chords make them want to agree.”
The tour kicked off in Kansas City, Missouri, a week after the album’s August release, and took Batiste to Morrison, Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre for the first time. Performing at the famed Santa Fe Opera, in the middle of the New Mexico desert, felt particularly spiritual to Batiste. Some have told him the show reminds them of old tent revivals. “Sometimes you get folks who it unexpectedly reaches in that deep place, and they find themselves in tears,” he says. “Even the ones who didn’t come up in that tradition.”
Strip blues music down to its core and you’ll find the pentatonic scale, which comes alive when you add the so-called blues note tritone on top—the “devil’s interval” that church leaders once tried to ban. “You heard the pentatonic scale and blues inflection in folk music all across the history of the world, going back to drum circles in Africa,” Batiste notes. “It was like somebody took a thing that everybody felt but didn’t know how to say and said it the way that everybody wanted to say it. It’s such a deep form because it’s inherently a Black American expression, but it’s also the most universal expression of humanity. Blues will never die because of that.”
Last year, a tour stop at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium—and the camaraderie with local musicians backstage—inspired Batiste to adopt a simpler approach to recording. “There was such a purity to the energy around that show,” he recalls. “It’s how I imagined those golden eras of music-making, where everybody would be playing on each other’s recordings and hanging out in a non-transactional way.”
He wondered if he could transfer that feeling into the studio, so he allowed himself to loosen up, recording the album’s seven tracks over two weeks in Los Angeles, mostly in single takes. He enlisted Andra Day for the precious, Sly Stone-tinged ballad “Lean On My Love” and cold-called Randy Newman (they bonded over scoring Pixar films) for a cover of Ray Charles’ 1956 hit “Lonely Avenue.” Batiste sat at a piano in Newman’s living room, trading verses, with the elder legend singing in his signature husky croon and Batiste scatting like Charles. “Ray Charles was a real architect of sound in the sense of building his own identity, using elements of country, jazz, every form of Black American folk music and Americana,” Batiste says. “So the idea that Randy and I would be playing a Ray Charles song is very deep.”
“It’s almost like magic, the way the rhythm and the chords make people want to agree.”
The process itself challenged Batiste to remove distractions. The plucky ballad “At All” opens with him singing, “I ain’t gonna take this flight to London tomorrow,” which is literal. “That song is actually about me extending the recording session because I had an engagement in London that I was advised that I couldn’t miss, but we were in such a great flow that I didn’t want the art to suffer,” Batiste says. So, he kept recording. “You change your philosophy about what perfection is, and you evolve to understand that the moment is perfect. So you don’t have to do anything.”
Y
ou can see how much Batiste values heritage by spending time at the Brooklyn home he shares with his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad. In their living room, there’s a large structure made from water bottles—a piece by artist Willie Cole, turned into a stunning chandelier. “Folks won’t even notice, until they look up, that it’s not diamonds or something,” Batiste says. “It’s very ironic. But it also speaks to our values. That’s one of my favorite pieces.”
The couple got married in that same living room last year while Jaouad was undergoing treatment for leukemia. They chronicled that chapter of their life in the Netflix documentary “American Symphony.” What started as a film about Batiste composing a symphony eventually evolved into a tribute to his wife and their creative partnership, whose theme of resilience resonated. “There’s always life that’s happening and, a lot of times, we don’t feel empowered to share that or to be open and vulnerable about it,” Batiste says. “People are going through different life interruptions, and it’s encouraging to see how they figure out how to deal with that and find peace with being vulnerable and sharing that. It’s been inspiring because we didn’t know how it would turn out.”
Their house is like a shrine to their respective upbringings, filled with sentimental objects that reflect what the New Orleans-raised Batiste calls “a global sense of home.” Growing up, Jaouad moved between Tunisia, Ethiopia and Switzerland. “For me, being in New Orleans, having different aspects of African, French, Spanish and Caribbean culture, connecting in one city,” Batiste says, “I didn’t realize how global it was until I left. I’d go places and be like, this reminds me of something we had in New Orleans. We realized that there were a lot of common threads, even though it was completely across the world from each other. We started to try to collect pieces that were at the connection point of all of these cultures, and that’s how we built out the house.”
There are pianos in every room, but the parlor level is where Batiste keeps his collection of instruments, from the accordion to the oud, within reach. “I have lots of different melodicas, tons of guitars and stringed instruments. I have my saxophones and lots of vintage keyboards,” Batiste says. “Not the digital ones, but the analog keyboards, like the Farfisa, which Sly and the Family Stone made famous.”
One of his most treasured possessions is his father’s Fender Precision Bass from the ’60s, gifted to Batiste when he was a kid. “That bass has got a spirit to it. That’s like, if folks pass on a wedding dress. It’s one of those things that’s not even something you use all the time,” he says. “Beyond the monetary value, it’s very, very deeply rooted in my lineage.” He’s actively continuing a tradition he admires in Louis Armstrong, whose former home in Corona, Queens, is now a museum with recordings, handwritten letters and collages made from magazine scraps. “People would come and visit him in his study den, and he would record for hours and hours,” Batiste says. “I was very conscious of that, so I keep an archive.” Those instruments and recordings are all part of his own evolving artistic legacy, a work-in-progress museum, if you will.
Batiste drew on his love of music history as bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” a role he held for seven years. In Batiste’s early discussions with Colbert, they expressed a mutual interest in bringing jazz into the late-night format. When CBS announced the show’s cancellation this past summer, Batiste attributed it to “big money” influences. “[Colbert] facilitated a very incredible iteration of ‘The Late Show’ as an institution,” Batiste says, adding that every late-night house band in the format has championed a unique style. “The bandleaders had an approach that was electrifying in their own way, like Paul Schaefer and the World’s Most Dangerous Band. His whole vision was to bring rock and top 40 music to the format. The Roots brought hip-hop.”
Batiste is elated that he and his longtime band, Stay Human, were able to introduce audiences to a broad spectrum of styles, working with everyone from Mavis Staples to Yo-Yo Ma. “It was such a thing to hear music from Beethoven and Mozart to New Orleans folk to indigenous African chants,” he says. “We had a week where Wayne Shorter was a guest, and then Roy Haynes, Benny Golson—all of these jazz musicians who weren’t usually on television.”
That streak of collaborations, for him, is the ultimate expression of music as a living artifact. “It’s an unusual artifact,” Batiste says. “You can’t hold music. And unlike a physical artifact, it can’t be improved upon in a way that’s better than what was in the past. It’s only a continuum. It continues to expand. But it’s not like one song that’s made in 2025 is better than something that was made in 1925.” You can’t hoard it in a studio, but certain songs, of course, develop a patina. “When you first hear it, even if it’s from another time,” he says, “it is brand new to you.”
Hair, Donato Smith; grooming, Lauren Chemin.
