Jon Batiste
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
There's a deep sense of connectivity that you have. with your soulmate, whether you meet somebody who just gets you, you look them in the eye and they see you and you see them and then you come inches away from the veil, you almost lose that person.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And that's in the back of your mind when you're doing everything, when you're on television, when you're accepting an award that everyone in the world is telling you you should want more than anything else. And that is a force that, it ransacks your psyche in a way that I didn't realize the power of creativity as an antidote until then.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And through our shared creativity, there was a lot of light that we created together and apart from each other. I sent her lullabies. She would paint, as you see in the documentary. She couldn't write. Her vision was blurred from all the medication.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
this incredible renowned writer but she couldn't write so she began to paint and just that practice alone was a a form of transformative healing power and and light that gave me the motivation to be able to leave her because i didn't want to leave her side you mean leave her and go to work Exactly.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And it's funny to say, going to a Grammy ceremony where you're nominated 11 times is work, but it puts things in perspective. But for me at that time, creativity was the power that allowed for us to stay connected and for me to have the will to go out and do all the things that you saw me doing at that time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Oh, wow. Yeah, so... These were originals, and they were just as the paper. They were daily. I would send them, and she would have her laptop playing these lullabies that I would send. I would record them on Logic, which is a software program on a laptop, and I would send them. She would listen to them on loop as she painted. One of them became a song.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
That's in the world called butterfly, but there are dozens of these lullabies. But butterfly started like this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Driving around with your head held high. Butterfly flying home.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Just a little taste of it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Oh, well, you know, there's something about the themes that Beethoven was able to
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
No, no. It's something about the themes he was able to manifest that are all sitting right there. It's pre-written by the divine source or the creator. It's just sitting there in the divine stream of consciousness waiting for someone to pull it down. And he was a vessel for so many of those things that we all feel and we all want to hear, but nobody had played yet. Just that theme of thinking about
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
a minor chord, you know? And the second inversion was... Just that idea is so simple. It seems like it would be right under our nose. But the way he was able to pull it down for all time is what's exciting for me about his music in general. It has all these things that are so universal, so hardwired into our mainframe. And when you hear it, Now that to me sounds like blues.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
That feeling is connected to the human condition. It is the human condition made into sound. It's something about his music that is always reflective of our collective state and how we deal with our internal world and how we
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
either transcend or how we fall into despair and how we then come back up again like a phoenix it just is it's connected to something that's very very fundamental in humanity thank you it's just been absolutely a pleasure and an honor for me so um be well and um i wish you all good things yes indeed thank you and likewise to you and your family thank you so much
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
It's something that brings people together around the piano. It's that thing that if you're at a party and you had a piano lesson once or twice in your life and you're having fun that night, you might go and play or somebody plays it and it's just so ubiquitous. It connects to something that is rare for us to have all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
I learned as a kid, you know, one of the first things that I learned, and then I had this habit, which as evidenced by this album, I still do, of being in conversation with the composer. And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
I like to call it spontaneous composition, which is this difference between improvisation and spontaneous composition. You frame it in your mind first. You map it out, and you create a form, and then you allow for surprise. But you're really just executing on this thing that you composed before sitting at the piano. And it can be different every time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
So this has a bit of a structure that is on the album, but every time I play it, it's going to be different.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Well, when you think about the blues and Beethoven's music, his music was actually deeply African, you know, rhythmically. There was this thing that's happening in his music that I really love where he's playing in two different times at once. He's composing and it's
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
in a two meter, one, two, one, two, which is like a march, and waltzes, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. So if you put the march,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And the waltz together, you get a two against three, an odd against an even, which is the West African rhythm, the 6-8 rhythm that comes from Africa that leads to the American shuffle rhythm, which is the clave of the blues, if you will. It's the base rhythm for so many popular styles of music and styles of music since the beginning of rhythm.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
There's polyrhythms. Even in that short theme, you're hearing the two and the three. When you put those together, it creates something that is infectious that whether he was referencing that or not, it's something that's a universal, connective, magnetic truth in music. It's like things that make you cry every time you hear them, things that make you dance every time you hear them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
It's just something in the DNA of that sound.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Penta. You hear that in music all across time. And something about that sound gives you the feeling of the blues already. Now, when Beethoven has this. That right there. That's what we call the blue note.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
And that hadn't been invented, that hadn't been codified yet, but when I heard that in this piece as a kid, it immediately made me think about the blues that I was learning downtown from my classical lessons. So I would think about, okay, well. The blues scale that we all learn when we're children is the pentatonic scale with that added blue note.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Now, that's just one very small example of perhaps the idea that Beethoven, if he were around in the 21st century today, he probably would take these sounds, most likely would incorporate them in the music that he'd be composing today, which is a very exciting proposition.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
The rhythmic underpin of this melody carries so much musical information. It's full of inspiration. And that rhythm, that two and the three, that sound of the polyrhythm that is of the African diaspora that continues through all these different forms of music, I heard it, and I just wanted to bring it out. I wanted to take those implications and bring them out further.