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The award winning jazz musician from Louisiana
last week released "We Are", described by Vanity Fair as "a
vivid turn from straight jazz to joyful, danceable pop and
neo-soul".
"The album is something that I have not heard done in popular
music, which is defying the construct of genre, which I think
has pigeonholed a lot of artists," Batiste told Reuters in a
Zoom interview from his New Jersey home.
"There's no genre of person. And therefore, there are no genres
of music."
Known for his work as the musical director of U.S. chat show
"The Late Show With Stephen Colbert", Batiste is in the running
for a best original score Oscar for animation "Soul", for which
he already won a Golden Globe.
Sitting at his piano, the 34-year-old said he hopes his album
will show humans are all connected regardless of their skin
colour or gender.
"When we try to fit music into these small cubby-holes we limit
the humanity that can be expressed through the music, and it's
the same thing that happens when we try to limit people into
these genres of ... black, white, woman, all these things," he
said.
"So this music is almost a total allegory to show ... we're
connected in ways that are much bigger than the things that we
give so much credence to on the surface."
"We Are" took shape over six days in September 2019, during
which Batiste said he had "around the clock sessions" with
musicians in his "Late Show" dressing room and got the
"blueprint" done. He completed the record last summer.
In June, he gathered musicians in New York's Union Square to
protest racial injustice in the United States following the May
25 death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a Minnesota
police officer knelt on his neck.
"I do think that what's happening in our time is a crisis of
identity, which then leads to ... the problem of apathy,"
Batiste said.
"And being able to speak to that in this time ... is more
important than ever simply because we've been disconnected from
it in a way that has led us to identify with things that are not
actually who we are."
(Reporting by Sarah Mills; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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