Voices

Musician and composer Jon Batiste and Juilliard dance director Alicia Graf Mack on reinventing spaces and institutions in the arts

Over the past decade, Jon Batiste, the virtuoso musician, composer, and Juilliard graduate who since 2015 has served as bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, has marched to the beat of his own improvisational drummer. Born into a legendary New Orleans musical family, Batiste grew up steeped in jazz, blues, gospel, and R&B, but his tastes run wide. His most recent album, 2021's We Are, explores a range of influences and genres while also tapping into the tenor and tension of a historical moment when culture and identity, race and reckoning, and the personal and political have all become inextricably bound. In the late spring and early summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic entered its first peak and calls for social justice grew louder, he began performing songs from We Are, as well as hymnals and protest anthems, by himself at a series of street-side concerts in Brooklyn. The 35-year-old Batiste is nominated for 11 Grammy awards this month, including eight for We Are and three more for his Oscar-winning score for the Disney-Pixar animated film Soul. On May 7, Batiste is also scheduled to perform at Carnegie Hall to debut American Symphony, a tribute to Duke Ellington, James Reese Europe, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, and other Black musical giants who have graced the venue's stage.