Jon Batiste

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is John Batiste. John, last night you
played Redrocks. Tell me about that.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Well, well, you know, riding along in my automobile, my
baby besigned me after wheel Man.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
I sunk so hard I lost my voice to people
were stomp It was two hours and forty one minutes
of a performance.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
I don't even call it a performance.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
It's a spiritual practice, celebration of life, love, joy music.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I mean we played.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
So much that I lost track of even where I
was and what was going on.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
That it was a concert.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
The band was on just the band was on eleven,
and we had Steve Jordan, Pedrito Martinez and a few
other special guests, Nick Waterhouse Andrew Day. So it was
it just felt like a true zenith moment. And this
is just the beginning of the tour. So I'm very
excited to continue.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
You say two hours and forty one minutes, so you time.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
It exactly, No, but someone on my team does.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
And it came to me afterwards, and you know, this
is after showing me photographs of the security at Red
Rocks who were becoming one with the audience and showing
me photos of the staff and videos of the staff.
Just celebrated and danced, and we jumped off the stage
at one point, and we were in the audience for
about thirty minutes playing. And then after that, when I

(01:50):
kind of came down, my key hour comes to me.
She says, do you know how long you played just now?
And I was like, well, it felt like the normal
set length, but how long was it? She said it
was two hours and forty one minutes, and that's not
counting the encore, so it just was. I mean, those

(02:11):
are the kind of things that happened. You know, it's
in the church.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
They say, we got to tarry here for a while.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Had you played Red Rocks before?

Speaker 3 (02:20):
No, that was my first time playing, first time planing,
and I just I've heard so many great stories. It's
hard to describe what it's like on that stage until
you're on the stage. So now I have this first
hand experience that it's just it's really a sacred zone
for music making. It's a cathedral and ancient cathedral of music,

(02:47):
and you feel that sort of presence when you're there.
There were moments where I would just play in the
context which you wouldn't recital, you know, just solo piano
and I would be playing, and you could just hear
the resonance of the space, and you could feel the
way that it all just works in the divine alignment,

(03:10):
and there's nothing that beats God's design. There's just such
a special resonance in the frequency. You know how they
say that the overtone series, the harmonic series. If you
listen to water, or if you listen to the lowest
note on the piano, you can hear the entire infinite
harmonic series that makes up the Western Canada music, well

(03:34):
tempered music, and it's in nature. I really experienced that
last night for maybe the first time in my life,
playing a solo piano segment of the show, where you
could hear the resonance of our well tempered system in
action with nature ecologically.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Okay, you played a million different venues. A lot of
them are just true aditional concert halls. Are there other
venues that have turned into transcendent experiences or somewhat different?

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Bob, That's what I'm in the business of, that matter
what I'm playing, what I'm in the business is doing
is creating an experience that transcends the space and the
time in the moment that we're in, so that this
music really is used for what.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
It's made for. It's more than entertainment. It's a spiritual practice.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Music was a part of the fabric of everyday life
for many communities at the beginning of time, since the
first drum in Africa, the passing of the fiddle and Appalachia.
I mean, just think about all of the different ways
in New Orleans that music is still a.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Part of the fabric of everyday life.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Music for when people are born, music for when people
pass away into the next round. There's just such a
special power that music has, and I truly feel blessed
to be a joy bringer in music, not just with
skill and craft. Sense of craft is never lost in
that experience. But you know, I mean, I just remember

(05:05):
playing in all manner of venue and having this sort
of transcendent experience bubble up from the beginning of the
concert and by the end of it we're all family.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Okay. You talk about a long history of music through
the time of man. In your lifetime, have you seen
a change in the perception of music, the kind of
music or you just think the ball keeps rolling.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Well I think that more and more the music industry
is is with.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
And this is with many great exceptions. I don't say
this as a blanket statement, but the music industry is
more controlled and operated and even inhabited by folks who
don't really care about music making. There are those who

(06:00):
still care about music making and still care about the
idea of what music is in the world philosophically, the
history and the lineage of music and the traditions being
carried forward and added to in the continuum of human creativity.
There's a sense of devaluation of the music and there's

(06:22):
a sense of creating this sort of pacified audience that
I believe is a mark of a lot of the
governmental peril that we see in this time and a
mark of where we are in the world in terms
of how opaying information has become and how there's a

(06:46):
sense of not always knowing if someone has been compromised,
when in most cases for generations, these are trusted so
trusted voices and a lot of things have been compromised
as of late, So we're in this age where there's

(07:09):
a post truth resonance, and I believe that that directly
is impacting the arts and the creative communities. And it's
why the real musicians, the real artists, the ones who
really understand the power of what we do, will rage
against it. You saw a similar thing happen in the

(07:31):
sixties and seventies, and hopefully there'll be a consensus amongst
artists to continue to come together in this time in
a similar way.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Okay, let's go back to the sixties. In the sixties,
it was really the youth versus the elders. We had
the war in Vietnam and the draft, and we had
ubiquitous top forty radio such as if you had a
that said something, everyone heard it. Other than Trump, no

(08:06):
one can reach everybody. So in addition, a lot of
people are afraid of pissing off Trump. In the consequences,
there are people who are afraid to speak up, take
a stand, and then there are people who see themselves
as brands and don't want to sacrifice a dollar. Now,
there's certainly people like you, But this movement you taught me,

(08:29):
you certainly set the landscape. Is it something you already
see or is something going to change? What has to change?

Speaker 2 (08:39):
It's always people power, people power, is it? Man?

Speaker 3 (08:45):
I'm really someone who sees my artistry as of the
people and photo people and with the people, And that's
really a true statement of what this movement has to be.
It can't be from the top down. It has to
be from the dirt. And that means that you have
to motivate people to understand that we are being duped

(09:08):
and bamboozled. You have to get people to a place
where they feel a motivation and a conviction too to
use the powers that they have and the band together
and use the voice of the collective community to say something.
And that's something that's difficult to do in this time
because again we're there's so many things that have segmented

(09:32):
society and amplified a minority's voice as the majority.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
So when you have that happen, there's this sort of.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
That that there's a mirage of of of.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Insight and and and and you can't really know what's real.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
So in the sixties, when you just just you just
laid out the design of how the delivery systems of
music and me right today you said that.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Well, there's only Trump that can reach everybody.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Now I'll add to that, there's also so many people
who have a voice and have cultivated a community, whether
it be the dark Web, whether it be all of
these other toxic spaces that exist. And that's become something
that the mainstream media has not only begin to address,

(10:30):
but in some cases even adopt. And this has created
this sort of narrative where it can only come from
people face to face. It can only go back to
the natural person to person communication, localized community activism and

(10:50):
engagement artists making music and speaking to the things that
are around them.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Another things saying to church, take care.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Of demons in your range, that people have to become
become social again in the context of person to person
communication outside of the bounds of the Internet and outside
of the bounds of artificial intelligence. And nothing's wrong with

(11:19):
those things, per se. But when we lose the ability
to see each other and now we're only seeing groups
and isms and categories, it leaves us in this state
of disarray.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Okay, what can a musician do to effect change, combat
the past and move us to this place you said
we should be in.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Music is the most powerful force on God's green eer, Bob,
let me tell you what music can do.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Music.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Last night we went in Red Rose, ten thousand people
singing as to clapping against it. They don't know each other,
they left as family. If artists make true music and
speak from a place of authenticity and perform from a
place of excellence, that is something that goes beyond technique,

(12:21):
goes beyond study. It's just a place where it becomes
a voice of the creator coming through the vessel of
the musician. And that's what I believe musicians can do
is be great, truly great, not great and branding not great,

(12:42):
CEOs truly great because when people see that, and people
experience that, something in their soul opens up, something in
their heart becomes less hardened. There's an ability then for
there to be a true dialogue that's rooted in humanity.

(13:04):
My band for many years and still at times i'll
play with this band, it's called Stay Human and my
music for many years since I was in college, I
started to call it social music for lack of figuring
out there was a better genre title for it, and
thinking about all that, I'm just seeing the power of

(13:24):
music more and more, learning that we can speak to
people on a real, authentic wavelength, and then that allows
for us to have conversations about other things.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
But first it starts with us being great.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
You saw this in many, many times in history where artists,
whether it's Bob Marley or Lewis Armstrong and Nina some
own not just their voice and their perspective on things,
but their excellence coupled with their perspective on things moved people,
moved mountains. Maybe of Staples pop state of Staples singers.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I mean, I could go on and on. Man.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
Even before that the way that we use, you know,
I was I was able to have a relationship with
Congressman John Lewis before he passed, and he talked about
the times when they were marching and they would break
into song and what the songs meant and what the
act of singing together meant in those moments. And they
weren't professional musicians striving for excellence in the craft. But

(14:23):
this is what our musicians left us. They left us
with these superpowers. They left us with all of these gifts,
and we're not using them to the fullest of our ability.
We're using them for scale in capitalism and to make
money and to and to dupe our youth into this
sort of full sexual revolution, full in the in in

(14:47):
identity that this fake identity of this generation gap that's
a perceived generation gap when we should actually be all
connected across the generations. There's so many things that we've
been duped to believe through music that's been engineered to
bamboozle us and to confuse us. So I believe that

(15:09):
if we just used music for what it actually is
and for what it actually can do, and we did
it at scale, in the same way we're doing this
other stuff at scale, then.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
It would change so much of the ethos of our time.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
That's very interesting because then it becomes less about a
specific song and more about the performance and outlook. But
in any event, you're playing to this large audience of
thousands last night. Who is John Batiste's audience.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
You know, my audience, which is an audience I'm very
proud of, is made up of lots of families. There's
a lot of people who I tell you one story,
I was in Indiana. My first tour was last year,
and this is my second tour. I've had a very
unusual career path, if you want to call it a career,
I don't really like that word. But just in general,

(16:04):
you know, I feel like I'm humbled to serve people
through my music. And I'm humbled to be born into
this cultural inheritance of New Orleans music and New Orleans
musical families, and I take it very seriously to carry
on the tradition of that. So that are those who
are into that and know that New Orleans lineage and
have followed that that are in my audience.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
There's a lot of people who, you know, I learned
this in Indiana.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
There's a four generations of a family that came out
and the eldest grandmother comes to me and says, I
saw Elvis and you and Alvis are my favorite artists
of all time.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
I've been waiting for you now.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
Usually people are looking for the coveted demographic of the
eighteen to twenty five or whatever.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
You know that, and they are there too.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
But I'm great, full, for the grateful for the the
folks who see me and it reminds them of a
time or an artist or a meaningful cultural treasure, a
meaningful era where we were creating at our highest and

(17:17):
representing the best ideals of who we are in the arts.
And then there's a lot of kids who were coming
up musicians, A lot of young musicians in the audience
who are you know, they're just starting their journey. There's
so many kids that resonate with my music. Also, now
that's the other side of the spectrum.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
There's a lot of aid and under.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
So there's families, there's a lot of older folks. There's
people who love New Orleans music. There's a lot of
people who are looking for an alternative to contemporary pop music,
which I'm also proud to represent bringing a lot of
sounds and music into the popular music space without being

(18:03):
a pop artist. But then there are a lot of
young musicians who are there and kids who are not musicians,
but something in the music resonates with them, which I'm
also very proud of. They're like, I don't know, there's
something in the frequency of the sound that makes it

(18:24):
feel like it's for them. And I've done things that
are just for kids when I was doing the stuff
I did with Pixar and things like that, but my
albums in particular, I'm always grateful to see the folks
reach out or the concert tickets go to kids, and
people online sending videos of their kid dancing to the music.

(18:45):
My kid decided he wanted to play piano because he
saw your concert or a lot of first concert goers
I get in the audience. So, yeah, that's a good blend.
It's a lot of it's a lot of range. Man,
I don't know what to say.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Okay, And what about black, white, Latino, red blue.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, there's a lot of people in the audience from
all races, depending on where we go and where we play,
you know. I love the fact that we'll play at
Coachella and it'll be one audience, and it'll be predominantly
younger people of people who are into the contemporary music scene.
Then we played before Red Rocks, we played in Veil

(19:34):
and it was upper middle class white folks wearing Patagonia.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
I like to call it Padagucci. All right, No, No, I'm.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
Just no, that's a good name. I know, zackly D.
I just never heard Padagucci before. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
So, and then I'll play in the South, like when
we played in Atlanta, or play in New Orleans, or
I'll play I'll play places where and this isn't the norm,
but if I go there, it's mostly black folks. And
and I love the fact that my community supports me
because I'm not a rapper and I'm not an R

(20:12):
and B singer. And we don't have a a archetype
in contemporary culture for the musician star.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
That's not something that exists anymore.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
The musician star and the band leader right absolutely most
of the time. Because of the way that we've been
they've tried to program us and to separate us. The
way that capitalism has created these genre categories is so
that it can be segregated. It started off based on
race records. Chuck Berry, to me is one of my

(20:45):
top five influence of all time, all of the race records.
I won't go into that as the tangent. I'm liable
to go on tangents, Bob.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Now, No, the tangents are the best part. Digression is
a spice of life. Go off, fund your tangent as
much as you want.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
But I'm thinking about how you know, our contemporary black community.
Our people are now programmed to think that music that's
for them has to come from the voice of a
rapper or an R and B singer in the contemporary
milieu of R and B. And I'm very proud that

(21:23):
over the years of building my audience, I've been able
to cultivate, specifically in the South, in the Southeast, a
community of people of color, Black, a black community, a
black audience that is listening to music that sometimes we
will play songs from the forties and fifties.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
On the show.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
We just last night did a Chuck Berry medley, as
I was saying, Then we went to Fast Domino. Then
we went into Duke Ellington and we played things ain't
what they used to be. We played don't mean to
think if it ain't got that swing into about one
hundred and fifty VP chopping wood swing that you would
hit basic play right. So this is not what my

(22:06):
community is acculturated into twenty six to listen to. Yet
it's what we were the pioneers of. And this is
the this is part of the mass deception that that's
happened in the way that we've spoiled our music and

(22:27):
thus the lineage of how we understand the music and
what's for us versus what's not for us? And I
say this to say everything is for everyone. Music is
the universal language. It exists so that it can break
down barriers. Yet because of this sort of this this

(22:49):
this psychological warfare that we've been dealing with in a
way that branding has overtaken actual craft and history and
lineage and the idea of the thing has become greater
than the thing itself.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
People believe that, oh, this is only for me, and
I wouldn't even.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Consider this over here, this whole world over here, because
it hasn't been in my orbit. It hasn't been service
to me. And I'm a proud disruptor of that. I
rage against that, and I love when I can have
in the audience.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
This sort of experience where.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
People now and this is taken close to twenty years.
I started when I was fifteen, and I'll go out.
We did a show in London and it was a
Royal Festival Hall and you know, it's about three thousand,
three to four thousand people you see in the audience,
and it was all different demographics. And I love that
because it was me solo piano in Europe, a black

(23:58):
pianist playing in a classical music milieu in a concert
hall for a wide range of an audience unheard of.
I love that that happened. And the reason I bring
it up is because the thing happened to the concerts.
To illustrate that is, at one point, as an improptu movement,
I played a version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, and then

(24:20):
I melded that into Tupac's changes and you could hear
the different parts of the audience reacting, and then you could.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
See from the response after the concert.

Speaker 3 (24:35):
The thought that those two things could be next to
each other, and these two poets could speak to each
other across time, and the relationship between that being displayed
just in a bare form in this way, coming from
the vessel of a guy who looks like me with dreads.
It really struck a lot of people, and that was

(24:57):
one of the highlights of that concert w when you
can see the people were responding to afterwards, and it
just struck me as, Oh, this is my role, this
is what I do in culture, this is who I am.
I'm here to kind of we finally this time, because
of technology and internet, all of these different things, we
can bring things together and synthesize things that have never
been put together before. Nothing is new under the sun,

(25:21):
but we can take elements and build something out of
these elements that the pioneers have left us. And that's
our form of being pioneers in this time, and to
really use the power and not forget what we have inherited,
So I'll say that to say my audience is diverse
by design, but I'm still on the path of developing that,

(25:42):
and it's been a very intentional, developmental process to focus
on one element at a time. I was a jazz
pianist for many years only, and I faced the world
as that. Then I became sort of like a band
leader for a while. Then I faced the world as that.
I became an artist and even step my toe in

(26:04):
pop music, and I face the world as that, and
a film composer, and I face the world is that
all as a way of trying to create a universal
musical experience that is contemporary and that everybody who walks
into that venue can have something that when they hear it,

(26:29):
they see something that they didn't even know about the
stuff they loved, and they develop a sense of what
music can be and what it truly is meant to be.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
Okay, you talk about the evolution jazz, being leader, working
with Pixar, etc. Are you just wandering through life and
opportunities come, or do you have more of a plan
or do you have a just an inner feeling like
you know, I want more than this.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
I'm you asking some good questions, man, you know, and
you're catching me at a very My voice is like
an octave lower because I've been singing all week, and
like I'm at a very vulnerable place.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
So you're getting some very real candid answers, Bob. But
I tell you.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
I I want more, and I oftentimes struggle with and
not because I'm not abundantly blessed and haven't had the
opportunity to do stuff that even those in the lineage
who I stand on the shoulders up didn't have a
chance to do.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
And I understand that, and I'm grateful for that.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
But when I see what's happening to music, and when
I see what's happening to culture and ultimately what's happening
to people, I really want more. I want to do
more to disrupt that, to shift it, to change it.
And I feel like I'm just getting started. And i

(28:04):
feel like I've never fit into the patterns of the industry,
of labels, of any of that stuff. And I've constantly
felt like I've had to find ways to be disrupted
from the inside and to shift gears and to get
into a position and then to figure out a way
to bridge it to the thing that I know is

(28:26):
the realest, most authentic way that you could have at
least for me, that John Batist could impact that moment,
in that situation, in that project, in that role. But
I feel like I need to exist within a context
of my own design, and I have to build something
that allows for me to fully utilize all the capabilities

(28:50):
that I've been given. And once I have that, whatever
this apparatus is, whatever this thing is, then you'll really
get to see the full color scheme and spectrum of
what it is that I've been blessed to give to
the world. And until then, I'm just fighting my way

(29:14):
through and doing the best that i can with all
the blessings that I've been given.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Okay, now more than ever, their acts playing Madison Square
Garden that most people have never heard of, their acts
playing stadiums that are niche. There's a Queen song, I
want it all, I want it all, I want it all,
and I want it now. There are people with billions
of streams on Spotify. You don't have billions? Are you

(29:46):
happy growing your niche? Or really, I don't want to
make it about ego career, you know, let's not even
give that. But you have a message, you have a
feeling inside, you have a burning desire to reach many
more people.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
No, I have a burning desire to be great.

Speaker 3 (30:07):
When I listen to Ray Charles, who, by the way,
doesn't have billions of streams. Ray Charles is truly great,
full stop. Lewis Armstrong, Nina Simone truly great, truly great,

(30:33):
Joni Mitchell, truly great. Some of my contemporaries who I
know are truly great. You know, I'm talking about people
who I don't know what their streams are or how
many people they reach, but I do know what they
make is one of one.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Could you give me a couple examples.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
I'm thinking about people like Sullivan Fortner, a pianist and
vocalist who I grew up with, or Caroline Shaw, who's
a contemporary composer of my late mental Kid Jordan, who
was an avant garde composed I'm truly another thing that that,
you know, my early tradition in New Orleans was actually

(31:20):
something that is is you may not necessarily think is
associated with New Orleans, But I grew up in a
in a community where I was learning from avant garde
contemporary classical musicians like Kid Jordan and Alvin Baptiste and
jazz musicians who were also a part of that community,

(31:41):
like Ellis Marsalis. So you know, I wasn't learning traditional
New Orleans music first. I was learning the avant garde.
So that's always like a foundational element of what it
is that I'm doing contemporary classical music, which was a
part of their their their pedagogy. So but it was
very hood. It was like the hood version. Like it

(32:03):
was like we would learn scores, sometimes without the music,
and it would be twenty page long score. Your part
would be twenty pages, and we would spend a week
with him dictating it like a grio, like an oral tradition,
your part on an instrument that's not your instrument, like

(32:26):
Alvin would be playing the clarinet to.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
You, and it would be, oh, let me interpret.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
Oh that's the harmony he means, he outlined, he appregiated
the harmony. Oh this is the melody that I need
to play. Oh in my left hand. You want that
left so he'll tell you. So then it would become
such a part of your system, your bones, it'd be
in you once you learned it. And those were my
first experiences. I learned how to do that before I
learned how to read music. I didn't even learn how

(32:57):
to read music until I was I found a way
to get into Julliard without knowing how to read music.
They put the sheet music in front of me in
the audition. Quick story, tangent. I'm sorry, I'm prone to
do this, but they put the sheet music from me
in the audition, and I just played and I was
looking at it might have been upside down, who knows,

(33:19):
but I just played improvised. And then after about a minute,
I stopped and I look at the panel of the
audition judges, like American Idol panel or something, and they're
just looking in there.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
It's like a pregnant pause.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
And then after this pause, they say, mister Baptiste, if
you got an opportunity that would take you out of school,
would you take it or would you continue your studies?

Speaker 2 (33:46):
And I looked at.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Him and I said, even sixteen years old, I started
school when I was seventeen, at Juilliard, so I'm like
already very aware of the politics of the situation.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Even at seventeen.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
I say, well, if I could take the opportunity and
continue my studies, then I would take the opportunity. And
that was the last question of the audition, and I
left and I got in the rest.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
Obviously it's history. I went to Julia. But I'm saying
that to say.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
I have been fortunate to be around those who early
on gave me a barometer of what true greatness is.
What is truly great is not a matter of the
taste of the trends of our time. And for me,

(34:44):
I know that's truly great stands the test of time.
So in terms of your audience question, it will reach
people who who seek that out and it will sustain
itself in the same way that Moza discovered the scores
of Bach. Okay, Bach is not only truly great. Between

(35:08):
Bac and Duke Ellington, you have two people who maybe
are the greatest at a thing that anybody has ever
been at, doing a thing outside of just music, full stop.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (35:22):
Now do people listen to that music every day? Is
that filling concert halls or symphony orchestra struggling. Gustavo Dudamel
is a friend of mine. He's one of the foremost
the conductor's voices in classical music.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
We talk about this all the time.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
How do you program a concert in twenty twenty five
of classical music.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Okay, I'm just saying this to say.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
The placebo of audience and taste is based on things
that don't have much, in some cases, anything to do
with actual music.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
It's more to do with community.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
It's more to do with the aspect of how you
want to cultivate your lifestyle and what things you want
to power that lifestyle within the ecosystem of your community.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Okay, John, you talk about the next two to five
years falling out, that's just a figurus speech. That's not
the plan. I mean, what would have to happen for
you to go in that direction for.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
That to happen.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
I mean it's a very likely possibility. That's not a
figure of speech. Two to five years is not a
figure of speech, man. It's the thing that keeps me
doing It is experiences like what we had last night
and things that happened when nobody is watching. Or it's

(37:01):
not something you read about an award that I can
win or something like that.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
It's the it's the people.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
Who share the meaning that this music has to them,
and not just my music, but the music in the
in the culture and the lineage of what I represent
and what it means to have that be represented in
the world, and have it represented in high places of

(37:29):
the world, and have it be in a position to
even have a conversation with the mainstream of what's going
on that a lot of times is averse to it,
and that feels like the motivation to stay in. But
then I feel like the I can still impact that

(37:55):
aspect of culture and exist in this in this way
for those people and for those who don't even know
that that's what they need. You know, as we proceed
to give you just what you need. But I can
do that and not I could retire, or maybe I'll

(38:16):
take us to bath. Sometimes I think about starting a
creative church or something.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
You know.

Speaker 3 (38:23):
I don't know, man, I just don't find it to
be real enough. There's too much fake stuff. There's too
much bs, there's too much stuff that isn't about.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
What I actually care about.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
Is a distraction from the sort of Mount Everest that
you have to climb to actually be great and then
to be able to do all of those things and
exist within the mediums that are now present for artists
to exist in and demands on artists for you to
be active in all of these different ways, just because

(39:00):
that's where the people are, and that's what the people
have been accustomed to doing, and that's where you're going
to have the most potential impact. Or figuring out some
way to circumvent the systems as they exist to.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Sort of create this sort of alternate reality.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
But that's still in response to the mammoth mechanics of
the industry today. So then you're kind of still in
relationship to it, you're tethered to it. You have to
almost become like an alt media system within your own
team and community.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
I just find all of that to be.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
Very very destructive and insidious, especially to those who actually
are pursuing the things that we're pursuing. So yeah, nothing
would have to change. It just have to continue to
be what it is or get worse.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Oh okay, let's break it down. Okay, you're someone who
make it very simple. You make recordings, you go on
the road, you do live appearances. Theoretically you could have
a manager who insulates you. Now, just being a person
on the planet, if you're online, you have people looking

(40:15):
for you, people abusing you, people complimenting you. Twenty four
to seven as you referenced earlier, there are certain places
where the people are which to a great degree, as
we speak, is TikTok. So the system is far from perfect.
You've established that. But once we get above the system,
what are the elements that are truly bothering you that

(40:38):
would make you say, man, I'm done?

Speaker 2 (40:42):
What a system? For? One is.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
Immoral, and it exploits artists and it exploits people on
both ends. And anytime that you have a system that's corrupt,
it will just become more and more corrupt, and over
time it will become something that eats itself and eats
its own, which is what we're seeing. Music isn't meant

(41:06):
to be as disposable as it's become. It's not meant
to be as homogenized as it's become, not meant to
be as difficult for people to I can go on
and on. So it's immoral. So let's break it down
and get simple. Just like you were just saying, let's
make it very simple. It's immoral, and it's very very destructive,
both to the purveyors of the music and the people

(41:28):
who are out there receiving it. Even though it brings
great joy and creates community and it's celebrating. It's hard
to be the thing that you also decry. It's built
on a faulty foundation. At this point, now, I'm not
someone who just makes albums and tours. I'm involved in

(41:54):
a lot of different things without a real understanding of
how to bring them all together quite yet. And you know,
there's a lot of opportunities that I have to really
impact humanity outside of just music or using music as
the way in, but also figuring out how to have

(42:15):
a seat at the table in many different philanthropic ways
in different parts of the world, and existing in burgeoning
fields that I think there needs to be an artist's
voice at the table.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
I've had conversations with folks who are in the AI community.
I've had conversations with folks who are in the tech community.
I've been sort of.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
Courting a relationship with Bill Gates with taken trips to
Africa together. I don't have a manager. I've been self
managed for a while. I've had a manager before, but
I think what it is that I do is a
bit too demanding and too wide range for that to
just be a traditional music manager. Some of the music

(43:04):
managers that I've worked with, I work with still in
some capacity, and some are friends. But in general, my
experience is that I'm difficult to manage, and I want
to do more than just tour and make records. This
is only my second tour. I'm thirty eight years old.
I've been in the industry since i was fifteen. So
I don't think it's as simple as you making it out, Bob.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
But it's the.

Speaker 3 (43:27):
Big thing that's simple to me and clear to me
is immoral and things are not built for the good
of people. And I just want people to feel the
true power of what music is. And I want the
authentic experience that the music exists in, and the experience

(43:48):
that my community thrives in to be one that's not
trying to fleece them and exploit them.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Okay, let's just go to the other side. You talked
about two to five years. You could say, Hey, I'm
packing it in. You also said the flip side is
I'm gonna have number one records. So tell me what
that vision is in your brain? How you achieve that?

Speaker 2 (44:12):
I just don't quit. You know.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
The other reason I would I would step out is
not because I'm quitting. It's because there would be a
better way to get to the people and give the
people the thing that I'm here to give them. And
it allows for me also to balance the things in
my life, like taking care of my family and being
with my family, my wife, spending time with my soulmate,

(44:38):
being in a world where I can be a human being,
so that the things that I deliver the people are
coming from a real authentic place, coming from arrested spirit
and a spirit that's overflowing with inspiration.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Now, if I stay in it, all of those things
will remain true. Bob. I'm gonna be inspired. I'm gonna
be able to.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
Do the things I need to do with my family,
and I'm going to figure out a way to do
it within the system, which means you got to get
to the top of the system, or you got to
get to the top of your place in the system.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
I'm in an.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Interesting place because in many ways I'm a new artist
and many people are just discovering me. And in other ways,
I've been doing it for a while. But as I
said in earlier in our conversation, you know, it's been
many different chapters, and each one of those chapters was
a first for a lot of people, and a lot
of those chapters in the world that I existed, they're
separate from the world that I existed in. Subsequent to

(45:33):
that chapter, just I moved to another world next that's
completely severed from the world that I just was in.
And you know, I remember having that experience when I
was I had the honor of playing on a tour
backing up Prints once and this was in the days
when I was just known to the world as a
jazz piano player and a jazz trio of my own,

(45:55):
forming and playing with the greats of the jazz community
like Abby Lincoln, Cassandra Wilson and Roy Hargrove and and
and really have an opportunity to play with you know,
Lewis Hayes who you know, and Curtis Fuller, played with
John Coltrane, all the all of the great elders at

(46:15):
that time that I got a chance to play with
went Marsalis also another another Kenna City.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
Five O four baby.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
But uh, I just remember realizing at that moment when
I stepped into that world and I played with Prince,
and I was like, Oh, the world is there, and
if you can deliver something of value to them, then
you can create a community around this sort of transaction
or this sort of exchange I like to call it. Now,

(46:44):
if you can create these sort of exchange models, this
sort of ratio of exchange with many different communities over
time and establish a connection between these different communities, and
then you can build it into something that represents a
common good, a vision of our collective importance to each

(47:07):
other and the essence of what we're all here to
be and do on this earth and the time that
we hear this limited generation of time. If you're able
to do that over time, you'll win, because most people
aren't doing that. Most people are trying to separate people
and create a reality that's based around why you and

(47:30):
your voice it's special and should be heard. And I
think that's important too, But that's not my call. My
call is to be the unifier. I'm the piper Bob.
That's what I am. And once as soon as I
accepted that, I realized, Okay, well, whatever it is that
I do, it's going to bring people into a room

(47:51):
that will never in a room together. It's going to
make people a part of a community together that never
would have thought that they would share a community with
each other. And I know that, so that's what I do,
and I have the ability to span genres as an
allegory for that. It's not just an exercise in me
showing musical snobbery and like, look how great i am.

(48:12):
Most of the time, I'm reining in my musical technique
in service of this. Most of the time, I don't
even like people who play with their technique on this leave.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Unless it's like Sullivan or you know, Jacob.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
Collier, who's another grade of this generation, who you know
doing some very interesting things. But I don't, you know,
I just my thing is is that, and I know
that it's very unique in this.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Time, and I know who I am in the world,
and I.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Know that if I were stayed in the space, inevitably
it would reach the point where I'm playing for the
whole world. And I'm already playing for a lot of people.
So I don't make it sound like I'm I don't
I'm going to sound like I'm slumming it all. I'm ungrateful.
But just to answer your question, what I see for
myself if I stay in the industry, it's to be
the biggest in the world and to bring back the

(49:04):
age of the musician, star, the band leader, the person
who is bringing all forces together on the stage to
show an allegory for humanity as one. And if that's
what I decide to do, mark my words, I will
do it. And anybody who knows me knows that what
I'm saying is completely one percent serious. But if I

(49:26):
stick out of it, you know, that's that's great too.
I don't have a burning ambition to do that or
to be number one in the world. I don't care.
But if I stick in it, that's what I'm going
to put myself to do, because that's just that's who
I am.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Let's go from the philosophical to the more practical, which
will have philosophical elements. You have a new album, Big Money. Ay,
Why did you decide to cut a record now? And
what is the process of both thinking about what you're
recording and actually recording it? And to what degree do

(50:11):
you even consider perception or you're just gonna lay it
down the way you want to.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
That's a great question, man. This is great to talk
to you because a lot of times the stuff it's
hard to present in an answer because the question doesn't
give the dimension for me to say what the process is.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
So that's great. I love that. I don't.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
I don't think about reception of the music or the
art that I'm making until after it's finished. So the
process of making it is a very subconscious reality that's
rooted in very concrete terms. I signed a record deal,
I signed for a certain number of record I committed

(51:01):
to that at a certain point, and I have to
make a record, So that's a concrete reality. Now, what
is the record going to be? That comes to me.
Sometimes it comes to me literally in a dream, or
I will feel a compulsion to make a certain statement

(51:25):
and it won't even be clear to me what the
statement is. Like the name big Money and the statement
of big Money didn't come to me until after the
album was finished, and there was a song that I
wrote called big Money, and it became the title track
of the album. It wasn't like it wasn't it was
reverse engineered in that way. I don't think about perception

(51:48):
of it until after it's done, because then once I
have the art made on its own terms, and it's
presented as true to what it's telling me it wants
to be as I possibly can present it, then I
think Okay, how do I give this to people in
a way where they have the best opportunity of enjoying

(52:13):
the party? How do I present this to the world
in a way where they have the best understanding of
exactly what this is and why this is? And then
from there it's really up to the people and the
systems as they are, and the delivery of the music
and all of the ways that people respond to it,

(52:33):
and all the context of what's happening in the world
around it and things that I don't have control of,
And you know, I don't. I don't beat myself up
about the reception of a record, whether it's critical or
commercial or things like that. Oftentimes people don't even have

(52:57):
the perspective or have been following along in terms of
my artistic statements and the messaging and the connective thread
of all of them, going back to my roots and
understanding what it is and who it is that I am,
and what I'm saying and why I'm saying it. Most
of the time, there's not even that sort.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Of of of of pedigree to even assess fully what
it is that I'm doing. And I don't.

Speaker 3 (53:23):
I don't say that in like a judgmental way or
in a way that feels like I'm above everybody. I'm
just saying that based upon the fact that what it
is that I traffic in, and how specific it is,
and how deep I am in it at this point,
and how committed to it I've been from the beginning.
If you haven't been with me, like they say, if

(53:44):
you haven't been in the gym shooting those shots, then
you're not gonna be able to assess it or talk
about it in the same way. You're not gonna be
able to play in the same sequence that I'm playing in.
And I'm okay with that because that's kind of what
I like. I kind of like I kind of like
hiding in plain sight until I'm not. I kind of

(54:06):
like being a dark horse. I kind of like doing
what it is that I'm doing and doing it at
the highest level I can possibly do it, And sometimes
people catch it and it gets rewarded, and other times
people completely miss it and misunderstand it and don't and
they think that I'm doing something that I'm not. And
other times it just is, you know, something that I

(54:28):
did that we don't give a certain sense of promotion
or a certain consideration of perception or how it's received.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
And I believe almost.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
That that stuff that I have done and that's been
more of that than anything else, Bob, to be honest,
more stuff that I've done that I've just put out
there or have created or performed or have documented without
even thinking about it being received and just putting it
there because I believe that it will have this radar

(54:59):
to catch people and they need to catch him, and
it'll be something that is a document of history. And
it's crazy because I'm not even like a big legacy guy,
like I don't really care what people think of me
after I'm gone, because it's like what Mike Tyson says,
like what is a legacy? I'm dead, doesn't matter. I'm dead,

(55:23):
Why you shouldn't be talking about me? Who cares? So
I'm not like a big legacy guy. But I also
have this wild instinct from my youth. It's just like
I call it wild because it's not logical of thinking
about what it is that I'm doing and how it's
perceived throughout history and service of people who I've yet

(55:44):
to meet. And I feel that strongly, and a lot
of my work primarily is driven by that yes, I
want to hit certain metrics and reach people and do that.
But I've probably and many times people have told me this.
It's like I told you that, I don't feel like
I'm a manageable person. I'm not like a good client

(56:05):
to be a not because I'm difficult or rude, but
because there's a lot of things that I could be
doing and could have done over the years to be
much bigger, much more successful. Dah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah. I think about things
primarily from the perspective of if I make this, I

(56:29):
feel like it's either for today or it's for some
people in the future. I don't know those people, and
I just feel like this is for them and I
have to do it because I'm the only one that
can do it.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
Okay, let's go back to the beginning. We've talked about
once the record is done, perception and reception. But let's
talk about conception. You say oftentimes you have something in
a dream. There are many Actually, when you're a musician
working with other people, there are many steps from conception

(57:05):
to completion. Okay, with some people, there's a demo wing process.
But you can have an idea in your head and
then there's so many chapters in getting it to the
end that it loses its essence or it's not as magical,
or sometimes a reverse. You're working on it and it

(57:26):
becomes better. So how does it work with you?

Speaker 2 (57:30):
It is different every time. Every single time is different.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
And this year, for instance, I'm gonna show you a
perfect example by looking at this and not nine months
stretch of time. I put out this big money album
which is recorded in a period of two weeks, the
band in the same room, breathing the same a playing

(57:56):
the music together, and going back to the sense of
recorded music is what I really like to think about
it as where you're just in a room making the
music capture in the moment, and you're trying to capture
this sort of lightning in a bottle, and it's like
the Rolling Stones recorded that, Chuck Berry, all these people
record that way, and then you know, within the same

(58:17):
nine months, I did a classical piano album, Beethoven Blues.
The conception of those albums, why I decided to those albums,
how I recorded those albums, the approach to rehearsing or
to writing or arranging.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Is it just is completely different.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
And then before that, I made the World Music Radio Album,
and the World Music Radio Album was literally an ambitious
concept album that was presented and written as if I
was writing a movie, and I was inspired by films.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
You know, I'm fat a lot by films. You know.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
I still watch Forrest Gump every year. It's probably my
favorite film.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
You know. And then.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
I think about, you know, even the We Are album,
how many years of different demos and ideas and things
putting things together, and how that album is actually a
natural outgrowth of the Social Music Album, which was an
independent album that I made that was like, really that
was like the manifesto of my concept and the vision

(59:28):
of what it is that I want to do, and
it's a record that probably no one has heard, but
so so I just think about how some of the
demos from that, which came out in twenty thirteen, became
what the We Are album is, and that's a whole
nother process. For big money. It was the opposite of that.
It was, you know, me really driving around the country

(59:53):
on tour. My first tour. We played at the Rhyme
In one night, I was playing a lot of guitar
on the tour. You know, obviously primarily a pianist, but
I play a lot of instruments and the guitar. I
was playing a lot of guitar, both on and off stage,
in the tour bus, looking out the window in the backstage.
Just all these things were processing in my mind, and

(01:00:14):
I took the guitar and I almost became an unorthodox
form of journaling where I wasn't even writing songs. I
was just capturing melodies and chords and ideas and all
these different people I was meeting. And I told you
that story about the Indiana the four generations of family.
I got a hundred different stories from people that I
met across the country on that tour, and stories about

(01:00:34):
how like I've been waiting seven years for you to tour,
and like your music is needed now more than ever,
the times of you know, all this stuff's happening around
that time and still happening. It just was, you know,
I was processing a lot, and the song Big Money
came in a writing session post this show I played
at the Ryman and I was playing the guitar, and

(01:00:57):
that was sort of the conception of the album. Subconsciously
the seed was planning after that show in that song
of Oh, this is a guitar based statement on the
times we're in maintaining faith these people, to look in
these people's eyes, who I'm meeting, the generational tradition of

(01:01:19):
what Americana is, how we can redefine and readdress that
in the contemporary time. And then also there was this
real convergence that happened between Dione and I no Id,
who was like my co pilot with this record. So
Dion and I have been talking for about five years
about you know, life and all these different things about music,

(01:01:41):
but not.

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
About collaborating per se.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
And then we had the opportunity to collaborate and work
on Beyonce's record, Cowboy Carter Record. When she was finishing
that record, you know, we co wrote this song which
I was writing on the guitar called American Requiem. It
was the first track of the record. And then that
was also like a convergence because I didn't know that

(01:02:03):
she was working on that project obviously, but it's a
similar not the same, because I'm not really into this
sort of let's all make country music now, but just
the idea of going back to the dirt, which is
something I've been doing for many years and have always
wanted to represent the contemporary space. But just having that
be a collective consciousness of artists who are doing this

(01:02:27):
sort of repatriation of music and of culture, particularly American music,
but globally has been happening, and just to see that
on the biggest level and to contribute to that and
have the honor of being a part of that, and
kind of one of the spearhead records of that led
to Dianna and I collaborating, which we had already been doing.

(01:02:48):
Is kind of where that kind of idea of American
recue on part of American recorum came from. But then
just going from that space of conversation with him, all
these things sort of converged conception of all of this.
This this stimulus led to a two week explosion, which
is like, I'm a binge creative. A lot of times

(01:03:08):
I'll say that, which is this idea that I'll sit
and stuff will be incubating.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
I'm always creating.

Speaker 3 (01:03:13):
I'm always doing demos or writing or journaling or whatever
it is that I'm doing in that period, you know,
takes different forms and then there'll be a boot. It's
like it's like lightning. It's like a lightning.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
I know exactly what you're talking about. And you want
to capture that emotion, that intensity before it goes away.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Yes, and that's what the record is. So you know
that's it. You nailed it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
I'm gonna switch gears a little bit more. You had
an album that won the Grammy Album of the Year.
How did that change your life in both good and
bad ways?

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
Well, you know, I didn't have a chance to really
process to understand at the time because my wife, Sulaika,
who is definitely among the most brilliant and special people
on the planet Earth and my soulmate, was facing a

(01:04:16):
life threatening diagnosis and we didn't know if she was
gonna make it to even watch the Grammys. She wasn't
damn person, but she was at home watching because she
had just done a bone marrow transplant.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
And my life.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
It's not to say that everything that you've been working
for up to that point is not appreciated, but it
felt more like my life was falling apart than a
celebration or sort of a shifting gears based on the Grammys.
It was a shifting gears based on what we were
going through at home, and the Grammys just happened to
be concurrent with that. Now, in the midst of that

(01:05:02):
just became such a difficult thing to fathom and even
wrap your head around that. I'm still processing how it's
changed me because I didn't stop.

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
I couldn't stop.

Speaker 3 (01:05:17):
I was and I was on a plane the next day,
and by the next night I was in the cancer
War that Sloan kettering. So the juxtaposition between doing that
and I was also working with my good friend, the

(01:05:38):
great Stephen Copet on the show, being his musical director,
and all this was happening right, and.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
There was no time to stop.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
There was no moment to say, wow, now let's go
back into the studio and make.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Another record, or let's go on the road.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
And less like, you know, what are we gonna do,
How we're gonna how we're gonna market this, how we're
gonna spend this, what.

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
We we got to get another collaboration on the books?
We gotta do.

Speaker 3 (01:06:09):
No, it was how can I not have a nervous breakdown?
How can my wife live? How can I maintain a
equilibrium at my uh, my day job, my my which
which was a thing that actually changed my life more
than the Grammys, being a kid just three years out

(01:06:32):
of college and being the youngest band leader on television,
late night TV at an institution that's now you know,
in the state that it's in. But to just be
in that position, you know, I'm forever grateful for that.
And and to just have go from not having money
to having money in the corner office on Broadway, you know,
that's the thing that more changed my life. But so

(01:06:52):
going back to to the moment, just how do I
stay faithful to that? And you're six of that, you're
five to six of that, And eventually what change was
something had to give and I left the show. And
I also, you know, just before this, my long term
team and the folks who really have been taking care

(01:07:14):
of me for that time, I just felt this inner
yearning before this, without even knowing what was to come,
that I needed to shift gears and to build this
thing that we talked about, the sort of world of
John Batista and what it is that I want to
do in the world and it's not just music and
music industry, and how can I build something that really
facilitates that, And you know, so I had completely before

(01:07:42):
this storm of life shut down my team.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
So I went into this.

Speaker 3 (01:07:47):
With no manager and no record deal, and I won
the record that the Album of the Year Grammy and
five Grammys that night, with no manager, no record deal,
and a complete disarray.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
In my life and a.

Speaker 3 (01:08:06):
Job that was four or five days a week, two
hundred and two shows a year on national television.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
And my position on that show was to bring joy.

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
Okay, Okay, I just want you to put that into
perspective because most people don't understand that when they asked
me about, oh, how did the Graham you? How did
that change your life? You were nominate eleven gram You know,
I've always watched Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson one of my heroes, right,
And it's like, people like you nominated for eleven Grams.

Speaker 2 (01:08:38):
The only person.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
Nominated more than that is Michael Jackson in a single year.
And you think that I would be like, wow, I'm
not even worthy. But I didn't even have chance to
to even be be able to sit in that moment
and process the magnitude of it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
It was just like how do I stay alive? Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
And and and then that record also what it meant,
and what most of the stuff that I make is
meant to do feel so far away from what usually
gets recognized in that way. You know, my grandfather was
on this record. He won a Grammy. He you know,

(01:09:23):
at the time, he was ninety. He's passed away now,
but you know, he's somebody who was an activist. He
was the first hotel workers Union president, and and the
and the and and the Postal Workers Union president and
fought instead. You know, at the time of Martin Luther
King Junior, the sanitation work strike, he was in support
of that. And this guy is like an unsung American hero.

(01:09:48):
So he's on the record and he's at the Grammys
with me, and you understand, like the people on the
record who won Grammys because of what that record was,
it's just beyond like no one hare's still not been
a critical a journalistic analysis of that and what that
really actually meant.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
Besides, oh, John Baptiste won a Grammy. This is not
I could just go on and on.

Speaker 3 (01:10:17):
About the significance of that, and we didn't even have
a chance to get into that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
You know, listen, I'm someone who congratulations for winning. I
think there's an over emphasis on the Grammys. The reason
I asked the question is, you know, once you have
that level of visibility, a lot of people are looking
for your time, a lot of people want things, and
you know, you're just the same person, so it gives opportunities,

(01:10:51):
but you're more exposed to bullshit too.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:10:55):
You know, I've been exposed to bs for a long
time and that didn't really change, you know, I'm I'm
someone who has always had a lot of people that
are competing to have FaceTime or to have some sort

(01:11:19):
of time. And that's before I was known, That's before
I was a Grammy winner. That's just something that I
think certain people have a certain sort of position in
life where you have to learn something from the way

(01:11:43):
that God sets you up in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
I'm an introvert.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
I don't like to be the center of attention and
to socializing that way, and for whatever reason, for most
of my young adult life, there's been a magnetism for
people wanting me to do this or be a part
of this, or be here or there. And it's really
been something that you know, I've been in therapy for that.
I figured out how to regulate, I figured out how

(01:12:09):
to step outside of my comfort zone both on and
off stage. I figured out how to verbally express my
thoughts and feelings acutely. You know, for many years, up
almost to the age of ten, I didn't speak. I
was nonverbal, Like I'm not just saying I'm an introvert,
I'm asked there this, It's beyond just I'm a quiet guy.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
So it there was not a shift.

Speaker 3 (01:12:34):
For me after the Grammy is It was just like
there was almost this sense of knowing within the community
the people that I was around that Okay, he has something,
we got to get a piece of him, or let
there's something there. And then the only difference after that
was now there was more money involved. So but I

(01:12:59):
don't think that people really understood how to leverage me
per se in terms of the kind of stuff you're
talking about, which I think happens to a lot of
people after like a major moment. But again, how do
you how would someone leverage what it is that I

(01:13:23):
do in the context of what they do in a
moment like that. It's difficult for people to figure that out.
So I think in some regards that protected me from
an onslaught of even more stuff. But yeah, saying that
to say, we have so many things that happen every day.
It's like hundreds of calls and requests. And it's been

(01:13:46):
like that for me for twenty years. It's just like
constant barrage of can you do this? Or can you
be here? Can you So I feel like I kind
of prepared for that in my life by just trying
to figure out how to get over my introversion.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
I want to get back to the introversion. But before
we do, what's the status of your wife's health today?

Speaker 3 (01:14:07):
We just did a tour together and that is a
it's not just the success, but it's a life milestone
because we didn't know if we would even be able
to travel after the transplant. We just did a tour
together for her book. She wrote a book and she's

(01:14:28):
I mean, I'm man. We could do a whole interview
about her Man's We talked about I want to use
my music to reach people. She just wrote a book
from her her experiences with journaling and her experiences going
into the darkness. She's written a book that's a practice,

(01:14:50):
a creative practice for folks who are going through similar things,
even not going through theys, just want to process what's
going on in the world, and she created this incredible
tour where we were on stage together and she's able
to tour and do things and write. She's been painting
as well. She has an art exhibition that she just

(01:15:11):
had and in our hometown where we live on the
East Coast, and she's doing really well with treatment that's indefinite,
which you know, is unfortunate. We have to deal with that,
but we're grateful that she's here. And then she has
treatment that we're going through every every month, and beyond that,

(01:15:32):
we're just hoping that as things evolve that will have
some better options as she continues to deal with all
the treatments.

Speaker 1 (01:15:40):
How'd you meet her?

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
We met We met in band camp, believe it or not.

Speaker 3 (01:15:48):
We were, you know, twelve and fourteen years old and
we met in Sarah Toolda Springs, New York at Skidmore College.
It was a I'm a music camp. There's an orchestra camp,
a dance camp, in a jazz camp, and she was
there as a classical double basis now mentioned you know,

(01:16:10):
the fact she plays double bass. It's just it's like
I love to brag on her because it's like she
plays the double bass. She got into Juilliard, didn't decide
to go to Juilliard. But that's when we reconnected. After
the camp. I was at Juilliard and she was at
the She was, well, we stop.

Speaker 1 (01:16:25):
For a second. Wait wait, you're at the camp. You
meet her at the camp. Is there a romance at
the camp?

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
No? No, no, no, no. This which is you know
with kids, it's not like that. It's more like.

Speaker 3 (01:16:39):
We we we're in the same circles and we have
this real connection as friends. It's nothing that we would
even think would ever be what it is today, but
it just.

Speaker 2 (01:16:52):
Is a real Oh that's a that's a cool kid.
I like.

Speaker 3 (01:16:58):
I like her, She's cool, and uh. From there we
stay in touch a bit. But you know, it's more
when we reconnect when she's you know, I'm starting my
first year at Julia New York. I moved to New
York now officially from Kena, Louisiana, you know, and and then.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
She's there and I'm like, oh, wow, look at that.

Speaker 3 (01:17:17):
You know, she's playing a double bass in the Juliard
pre college program, and you know, I'm trying to figure
out how did I even end up in school like this?
And you know, we just like reconnect and from there,
you know, there's so many things that happened. This this, uh,
it's just a really epic journey we've been on together.

Speaker 1 (01:17:39):
Well, tell me a little bit. Was like an instant
romance to that ups and downs, what was going on.

Speaker 3 (01:17:45):
I mean, you know, she had a lot of stuff
that was going on, and in a and and in
many different ways. We were friends in a in a
way that we supported each other. I would see her,
she would come to concert to mine. We would hang

(01:18:07):
out with a lot of the same people. We would
sometimes talk. Her dad was is a huge jazz fan,
and he would come to concerts sometimes when I was
in the jazz days of the Jazz Trio, and she
wouldn't even be there. So I got to know her
family and that way. It was just very much a setup.
But we always were with other people. And then at

(01:18:28):
a certain point she got sick. And this is like
twenty ten, twenty eleven, and this was the first time
she got sick and she was in the hospital and
I took my band to the hospital when I heard
the news that she was sick, and we went to
where she was and in her room in a hospital room,
next to the hospital bed. We played a second line

(01:18:51):
and he saw the nurses come out and they were
dancing in the hallways. We were playing on when the
Saints go marching in and you know, just kind of
serenading her, giving her some oh yes as a friend,
and you know, she she came through that. And once
she came through that, it was a moment where we

(01:19:12):
both saw something in each other that we hadn't seen before,
and that became the a's the beginning of where we
are now. So but there's just there's so many different phases,
from the awkward kid phase to the phase of being
go get us in New York coming from small towns.

(01:19:35):
You know, she grew up between Tunisia and Switzerland and
upstate New York, and now we're in Manhattan and we're
trying to, you know, figure out the world. And then
the phase of her getting sick and having this life interruption,
and then and us getting closer than that time because
a lot of people actually fell away from her when
she got sick because they didn't know how to deal

(01:19:57):
with the fact that someone twenty one years old and
you know, everybody's trying to play beer pong at parties
not visit you in the cancer ward and she lost
a lot of friends and we got closer.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
In that time. So it was like another at phase.

Speaker 3 (01:20:13):
And then from the phase of her getting well again
and that us developing a sort of romance, and then
my career kind of taking off in a different way,
in a way that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:23):
A career like it's a real career moment, like now
he's on TV.

Speaker 3 (01:20:27):
Like we saw him playing in the subway and then
like the Lower East Side in the village, and now
he's on television every night. And in those early days
when I was playing, she saw that transition. You know,
there was like many years where I was playing around

(01:20:47):
until your point about like people constantly want me to
do stuff for bringing me into things.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
I felt like we.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
Had a really cool era where I was like your
favorite band's favorite band, and like we would played these
secret shows and lofts and uh and in basements in Harlem,
and like one show Lenny Kravitz came and he played
with us and he was playing the drums and like
we were nobody. And then like questlove Emir, who I'm

(01:21:17):
all forever grateful for shouting me out once and in
this article he did, He's like, the three greatest shows
that I've seen this year.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
It's a three way tie.

Speaker 3 (01:21:26):
So he said, I still have the article because I
was such a big deal for us as a band.
He's like, he was, like, it's Beyonce Prince and this
kid John Baptiste googled him and thank me later, like
we were your red hot Chili Peppers came to one
of these basement shows I did in Harlem, and I

(01:21:47):
ended up making a record with Chad Smith and Bill
Laswell when I was in college that nobody has heard.
But but like again, like there was a phase where
I was everywhere but wasn't making any money and nobody
knew who my.

Speaker 2 (01:22:02):
Name except for like people like that.

Speaker 3 (01:22:06):
But she saw all of that, and then it went
from that to us being on television every night and
and our lives. We just have been through so much together.
A quick and fun fact side note. One thing that
Lenny Uncle Lenny, when when we want Grammy for Album

(01:22:27):
of the Year, he was the one who made the
announcement and gave me the Grammy, and he whispers in
my ear.

Speaker 2 (01:22:33):
I don't know if you could see it. You can't
hear it on the air.

Speaker 3 (01:22:35):
I tried to hear it, but you can see him like, man,
I'm so glad to be the one to give this
to you, from the basement to the grammy, Like it
was like a he was he saw you know what
I'm saying, just.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
Like the the range of what that was.

Speaker 3 (01:22:50):
But anyway, I I would not be who I am
without my wife. And she's she's doing well, God willing,
we continue to find advancements of how we can continue
to make her be here for years and years to come.

(01:23:11):
And she's such an incredible voice in culture with the
work that she does. So you know, I don't mind
talking about her. Ever, if you want to talk about
her more, we can do that too. Yes, like us
doing well, And that's a little bit about our story.

Speaker 1 (01:23:28):
Let's go back. You were talking about being an introvert
and going to therapy. Is that why you went to therapy.

Speaker 3 (01:23:37):
Yeah, I've always had a lot of thoughts that they get.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
It's hard to describe it. It's like.

Speaker 3 (01:23:52):
It's like if you have a clog or a backlaw
of stimulus and it's so rapid, the pace of it
is so the pace of it is so rapid that

(01:24:13):
you can't possibly formulate an understanding of it to verbalize
it at scale, So you have to figure out what
to do with it, because if it doesn't come out,
you have to figure out what to do to regulate
yourself as more more more compound on the thought to

(01:24:38):
begin with, I didn't have a way to deal with that.
And as a kid, you know, my mind, it just
was it's like racing, like and I'm seeing things. It's
like a lot of pattern recognition and a lot of
just like it's hard to just put in the words

(01:24:59):
like in just sometimes images or colors and just you're seeing.
You're just seeing all of this stuff, and it's like
some of it is a thought, some of it is
a feeling, some of it is a color that's representative
of an emotion or a sound. I don't know how
to it's hard, even until today to describe it. But
just figuring out how to put that into words was

(01:25:21):
why I decided to start doing therapy. And how do
I speak authentically and how do I how do I
exist as as as who it is that I am.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
I'm meant to be out loud in the service.

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):
Of of of of being a good citizen and being useful,
Like just how do I how do I deal.

Speaker 2 (01:25:50):
With all of that?

Speaker 3 (01:25:52):
And you know I needed to do that, and and
sometimes I am. I still struggle with that, you know,
I still That's one of the reasons why we when
we talked about two to five years. That's a big
part of it. What I'm what I what I do,

(01:26:14):
what I'm fortunate to do. It also takes blood for
me to do, like I don't like like, like Ruvenstein said,
you haven't played a concert until you spill to drop
of blood. Like like, I'm I can't. I can't help it.

(01:26:34):
It's hard for me to I can't. I can't even
go ninety nine percent. It's got to always be one
hundred and ten. Like I can't halfway do it when
I'm performing. And it's just it takes so much that
it's like, I don't know, man, It's sometimes I'm like,

(01:26:54):
I don't know if I can sustain this.

Speaker 1 (01:26:57):
Okay, I believe you're in Vegas, right, Yes, Okay, if
you're in Vegas, we're talking one on one. It's gonna
stop at some point. You don't have a gig tonight,
what will you do tonight?

Speaker 4 (01:27:13):
Man?

Speaker 3 (01:27:14):
You know, probably read YouTube. I'm a YouTube historian. I'll
probably call some of my conversational sparring partners and try

(01:27:36):
to talk about some sort of Who are.

Speaker 1 (01:27:40):
Your conversational sparring partners?

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
You know, there's a few for different things. Nobody you
would know. I don't think let me think about it.

Speaker 1 (01:27:48):
That's not important whether I know them. But you obviously
have a curious mind, are well informed and are very philosophical.
Most people not that way. Let's talk about the other side.
You're on stage, the other side of stage business. It's
a dumb business. It's not an intellectual business. So you're

(01:28:09):
having intellectual conversations. You know, musicians are different. So a
lot of musicians are quiet speak through their instrument But
how hard is it for you to find sparring partners?

Speaker 2 (01:28:22):
Man?

Speaker 3 (01:28:22):
Wow, you're really catching you catching the right questions. Man,
that's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
I like that. This is cool. No, man, it's not easy.
It's not.

Speaker 3 (01:28:36):
But I really don't mean that in a way. What
I'm not saying that there's like a people aren't interesting.
I think everybody is endlessly interesting. That's what makes me
so curious. I find that the way things work and
how the world has become, what has become and how

(01:28:59):
we can be a part in that, Like I was saying,
people power and just the understanding of how the the
that impacts what we do as musicians as artists, and
then what people go through on a daily basis, and
just thinking about how that postulating about where that will
go and what It's amazing. But you know a lot

(01:29:24):
of people that's hard to find. Folks like my longtime
friend and drummer Joe Sailor, who you know, he's He's
he's he's one of the folks that we talk a
lot about that. And now we always had an incredible,
uh musical connection is a great rhythmic hookup and just

(01:29:47):
sort of like a esp on the bandstand, and you know,
that was when we were teenagers, and and then as
the years went on, I realized, oh, it's because we
have a similar interest in these things as well. So
there's like I find a lot of times that there's

(01:30:07):
a musicians who have been with me for a while,
we've developed the culture of that. And then there's other
people who I talk to often who are not musicians
at all, are not a part of the business at all,
and it's really it's quite fascinating their perception of it

(01:30:29):
from the outside.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
So yeah, it's true. Within the industry, it's not.

Speaker 3 (01:30:36):
And that's another reason why I could see myself getting out.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:30:42):
I feel like trying to conform to the ways of
the industry and trying to service the needs of what
in order to continue to scale and be quote unquote
successful in this space means I have to sort of
damping or flatten certain aspects of what actually drives me

(01:31:06):
and what I want to give to the people and
how I want to serve.

Speaker 1 (01:31:16):
Give me one example of something you might have to
flatten or flattened.

Speaker 3 (01:31:22):
The narrative of big money as projected through social media TikTok, Instagram.
It's not there's not enough nuance for me to express
and for you to fully understand and what it is
that I want to express and what I think is
ultimately the true value of it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):
And an album cycle.

Speaker 3 (01:31:45):
And the way that those things work, and the way
that promotion works, and the way that all the things
are building a narrative and a headline and how that
has to be something that or you got to go
on the press and you got to say something outlandish
or just like, none of that is for me that's
all for the birds. That does not service and it

(01:32:07):
doesn't serve the audience to really get the music and
get the most out of the music. The way that
it is that we make the music over here, the
way that what we put into it, the way we
cook the food over here, is you're not gonna enjoy
it the most if you're trying to. You might get
to it, but you might miss it because of the

(01:32:29):
way of the delivery systems. So it just doesn't I think,
you know, if I think about, like for the for
the literary community, like some folks jumped on this thing
called substack because they were like, man, the delivery systems
aren't really I'm sure you know all about that, but
you know, just I'm thinking about, like, I don't know,

(01:32:52):
you see people trying to find alternatives, and the algorithm
the algorithms, Man, the algorithms reward stuff that doesn't resonate
at the frequency of what I do.

Speaker 1 (01:33:04):
Wait, wait, wait, I read something. I saved it. But
ultimately three there's this woman who's like a big Mozart
you might know Meetsuko Cheetah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:13):
Okay, yeah, of course, the greatest pianist.

Speaker 1 (01:33:17):
Yeah, okay, so she had a quote in Newsweek thirty
years ago, she said, I tell all my students to
practice really hard and try to do something great, because
there's very little great out there. So, yes, you can
talk about the algorithm. You can talk about this, but

(01:33:37):
it's kind of like pourn with the Supreme Court. You
know it when you see it, you know it when
you hear it, and very few people can touch that.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:33:48):
I think that's true, But I also feel like the
difference with porn and why that's so dark is because
it plays to the lowest to common denominate. It plays
to the basest, darkest instincts of people. Greatness plays to
our highest ideals.

Speaker 1 (01:34:10):
Not always wait wait, it may have that socially, but
and people may have to come to that, but it.

Speaker 4 (01:34:17):
May happen, That's what I'm saying. Okay, but it may
have an element that hooks them unknowingly and takes them
on the journey to the destination.

Speaker 2 (01:34:29):
But you got to hook them first, I know.

Speaker 4 (01:34:31):
But people, Okay, go ahead ahead, No, I mean listen
for a long time. In the Internet era, okay, first
ten or fifteen years of this century, if you did
something great, it would surface. Then you could do something great,
and people couldn't hear it, they could be lost. I

(01:34:52):
think we're switching back because there's such a plethora of stuff.
We have a complete society that every day is looking
for something that can tell somebody else about And you're right,
a lot of it is lowest common denominator. And you're
also right, many people are not playing on an artistic level.

(01:35:12):
But when you plan it, you know, I'm not saying
it's one hundred percent success rate, but when someone does
something and does something different, that's what truly resonates, you know,
timing and all kinds of things you can't control. The
system is fucked, but the system is not completely exclusive.

(01:35:33):
It doesn't completely rule out true artistry.

Speaker 2 (01:35:37):
No, there's exceptions.

Speaker 3 (01:35:39):
As I said earlier, it has exceptions, and I think
there's a lot of exceptions. But that's my point. I
think that it was somewhere in the middle. I don't
think that it's at a point where everybody who is
an exception to the rule is recognized.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
I agree there just stop on, just stop one point.
Music drove the culture certainly in the sixties and seventies
and eighties with MTV. If you want to know what
was going on you listen to a record, Okay, you're
talking about your jazz reference points. The reference point there's
huge incomm inequality. Okay. So you have the lower classes

(01:36:21):
having the low hanging fruit, and the year two thousand
Survivor launched. After that, everybody thought they were celebrity. They
were doing something. Then we had Jersey Shore. The people
was I'm doing this now, and then I'm going back
to Poughkeepsie. There's nothing here. Okay. So it used to
be that artist and artist that was that was its

(01:36:45):
own special thing. You went to school. I don't know
what kind of school you went to. I went to
public school. There were the art kids. They were different.
They might be beautiful, they might be hit, but they
were in their own world. Those were middle class people.
Those were the artists. I always use the example, you know,
Jefferson Airplane, where you like the music, they would they
would say no or they say I'm not going to

(01:37:05):
do that, whereas today the music is dominated by uneducated,
lower class people who can be pushed by the system.
You can't you have too much experience, intelligence, and they think,
I don't want to make it about Mariah Carey. But
if you're a younger persons out. That's your reference point.

(01:37:25):
I'm going to be a diva, etc. So a reference point.
Let's even use jazz, Mahabish, new orchestra or whatever. That
doesn't even come into the equation. So the system is
not We're not in a good spot. So I agree
with you there the crap is filling the channel. Yes, yes,

(01:37:46):
I mean and listen.

Speaker 2 (01:37:49):
You know. I also think.

Speaker 3 (01:37:54):
That that music, whatever how you want to classify it,
also has a place.

Speaker 2 (01:38:04):
There's a value to it for what it is.

Speaker 3 (01:38:07):
I don't consider anything that someone creates and builds community
around unless they're doing some heinous acts or this sort
of a form of destruction or assault and involved that
beyond that community is a good thing, and I'm just
talking about greatness in music is a different thing.

Speaker 2 (01:38:30):
Than building community with music as a part of it.

Speaker 3 (01:38:34):
And I think that this gotta we have to have
different tiers in terms of music for the sake of culture,
because music represents something much more than just a form
of us making songs. It's music is a real part
of who we are and how we continue to tell

(01:38:55):
the stories of our mythologies generations and develop identity over
time and remember who we are and cultivate where we.

Speaker 2 (01:39:03):
Want to go.

Speaker 3 (01:39:04):
So if we don't have the upper rung of culture,
the upper rung of music, of great musicians, of great artists,
great storytellers, in that way, you know, it's great to
have all of the other stuff, but when you don't
have that other level, we're in bad shape.

Speaker 2 (01:39:25):
And that's what I'm saying. We're in bad shape when
we don't have that.

Speaker 1 (01:39:28):
The thing you said which stuck out to me was
you talked about having people telling you to make compromises,
and then you're saying, the audience knows. The audience knows authentic.
So we live in a world where you say, get
a code writer, get a remixer. You might have something

(01:39:48):
financially successful, but that essence, I mean, I'll reference a
classic rock era. The labels were totally hands off. We
give you money, we have to put out the record,
we don't know, just go do what you do, okay.
Weren't the exact opposite thing. The suits say they know better,
they never do okay, And they said, well they got

(01:40:08):
to do it this way in that way, And you
have a lot of people saying okay, I'll do that,
and then you end up with compromise stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:40:17):
Well, I find that the artists can still figure out
how to how to how to make something authentic. It's
just the delivery systems of the challenge. If you if
you gotta if you have to go through what you
know you call the suits, right the labels or whatever

(01:40:37):
it is, or you have to get on a playlist,
so you have to you know, all the things you
have to figure out how to do. You have to
make something that is suited, no fun intended, you to
make something that that's sympatical with that. Otherwise you'll get
overlooked unless you figure out a way to kind of

(01:40:58):
bypass the algorithm or create a new algorithm. Now that
is rare, and that's what I'm saying, is a rare thing.
Greatness isn't in the algorithm. Greatness is something that transcends
the algorithm. It transcends where we are, and it reaches
people because it's truly great. But sadly, and not even sadly,

(01:41:21):
I think somebody doing something truly great, there's an intrinsic
value to it that doesn't need recognition. But I'm just
saying that most of the time, the things that are
truly great don't necessarily get recognized because of the way
that things are built. In the same way that you're
saying that there's a sort of a gatekeeper that's happened

(01:41:44):
in a different way that's impacting the processing of the
art and the conception of the art, I'm saying that's
also affecting why the algorithm doesn't bring greatness to as
many people as it brings things that you know, have
merit and are truly important to have in the spectrum
of things, but aren't musically great.

Speaker 1 (01:42:06):
Okay, I just want to go back to the introversion thing.
You've established two things, especially on television. You're doing two
hundred shows a year. You got your phone whatever it is,
email tech whatever, ringing all the time. You mentioned Bill Gates. Okay,
Bill Gates is interesting because not only is he successful,

(01:42:26):
he's mega successful, and he changed the culture with the technology. Okay,
my point being, you're the introvert in this case. They're
looking for you. Can you relate to these people?

Speaker 2 (01:42:43):
You know, I can relate to most people.

Speaker 3 (01:42:49):
I can relate to people who don't agree with ninety
eight percent of what I believe or think or how
I see the world. And again, that's part of what.

Speaker 2 (01:43:04):
Is you know, you talk about the introversion.

Speaker 3 (01:43:07):
I think that's part of why I'm able to relate
to a lot of people. It is because many years
of my life was spent observing people, and a lot
of times I felt like I was trying to figure
out how do I become a human? A normal human?

(01:43:27):
Like how do I live in the world? And everybody
seems to be able to express their thoughts and emotions
to each other, why can't I? Well, maybe if I
figure out how to understand where these feelings are coming
from from all these different people, then I'll be able

(01:43:49):
to do that. And empathy comes with that, and a
sense of wanting to be able to give everybody credence
and a benefit of a doubt and understand their perspective
truly and thoroughly, and to to really have that sort
of face time, that sort of really authentic connection with people.

(01:44:14):
And then that consequentially it.

Speaker 2 (01:44:19):
It's spilled over into my approach to making music.

Speaker 3 (01:44:22):
So then it's like, Okay, well, if I can create
these authentic exchanges and connect to people through this live
musical experience and really make something that just feels like
a revival or it's like something that just connects to
the soul of people, no matter where you come from. Okay,

(01:44:44):
now fast forward that approach to music and that approach
to being in the world as a person has created
an orbit where, you know, to talk about Joe Sale,
we always talk about like how did we get here?

Speaker 2 (01:44:59):
We'll be you'll see in my orbit where.

Speaker 3 (01:45:04):
In the same room or in the same week the
calendar of meetings or events would be. It's like if
somebody took like if you took five different professions and
you blended them together from five different worlds, and he
just threw darts at the profession board and it just

(01:45:27):
landed in all of these different spaces, and it's like
what it's created a magnetism of a different kind. That's
not necessarily about celebrity, but it's about the idea of
how do you connect with people authentically and what can

(01:45:49):
be done in that space of authentic connection? And that's
the common thread. Now do I relate to the people
who I'm I'm in this sort of courting or potential
collaboration with and some of them even become friends, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:46:10):
But it's not really about that.

Speaker 3 (01:46:13):
It's about the idea of what can we do together
that is meaningful, and how can we do it together
in a way that is authentic to what.

Speaker 2 (01:46:28):
Both sides do best. And if we can figure that
peace out For me, I'm all in. I think that that's.

Speaker 3 (01:46:38):
What we should be doing more of in government, in
all sectors of life. Why are we separating? We need
to figure out ways to be in concert with each
other and my nature, I feel like I've trained in
my life to be able to put a fence to

(01:46:58):
the side in some cases even to sit and to
try to figure out.

Speaker 2 (01:47:03):
Okay, I know there's a human in there.

Speaker 3 (01:47:07):
And I'm not talking about anybody in particular right now,
just to be clear, I'm just saying in general, there's
a human, there's a soul in there.

Speaker 2 (01:47:15):
I'm the soul doctor.

Speaker 3 (01:47:17):
I'm gonna get you to tap into your soul power
to James Brown said, and we're gonna we can uh
then have a real exchange. And and I you know,
anybody in the world I'm willing to have, not almost anybody,
I'll say, I'm willing to have a a one to

(01:47:39):
one to give an opportunity for us to have a.

Speaker 2 (01:47:44):
True, true, true dialogue.

Speaker 1 (01:47:54):
Okay, you've been expressing yourself here. This is about you.
Forget musicians, which is your culture, and they're different from
as a friend of mine would say, civilians. When you
meet these other people and it's somewhat transactionally, you're saying,
they know who you are, you know who they are.
Let's see what we can accomplish forgetting the transaction, because

(01:48:19):
usually there's a penumber. You gotta go to dinner with them,
or you gotta go here or there, whatever. Can you
find that you can really reveal yourself or do you
feel like I'm talk about your inner thoughts, but you
feel like these people are not going to really know
where I'm coming from. I'm just going to service them.
I'm going to try to accomplish the goal and then

(01:48:41):
go back to my room.

Speaker 2 (01:48:44):
I don't do all of that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:48:46):
I exist fully as who I am, and that's my
barometer for if something is going to work or not.

Speaker 2 (01:48:53):
I that's my way of I really should.

Speaker 3 (01:48:59):
Maybe be more strategic, Perhaps some would say, I don't
think so.

Speaker 2 (01:49:04):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:49:06):
For me to exist, that's also my superpower. For me
to exists authentically and truly be who I am in
the world, it would dampen it if I was to
try to figure out, Okay, how do I I don't know,
how do I maneuver?

Speaker 2 (01:49:27):
I think that's what you're getting at, like this idea of.

Speaker 1 (01:49:29):
I'm actually being less calcululated, like that you're an observer
of humanity. You know how to connect with people. That
doesn't mean they know how to connect with you. So
theoretically you could be a situation where they think you're
the greatest friend they've ever had, but they really don't

(01:49:50):
know who you are.

Speaker 3 (01:49:53):
Well, I think that, for one, there's a certain sense
of connection that you have with each person who you
are close with, who you've spent time with, that is
unique to you, and no one can ever know what
the vibration between you and that person is. That's something
that it's like sometimes when people see a couple and
they're like, why is she with him? And they're like,

(01:50:18):
you know that vibe, but it's how did they get together?

Speaker 2 (01:50:22):
What is that?

Speaker 3 (01:50:23):
Well, it's not for you to know. Between those two
there's a reality and for them it's.

Speaker 2 (01:50:31):
Real and.

Speaker 3 (01:50:34):
It may not be the same as it is between
you and him or you and her. Are you know
the kind of connection that you have varies between different people,
and the depth of that connection varies. You can go
deep with some people in a different way than you
can with others, but then on some more basic levels,
maybe there's not a resonance.

Speaker 2 (01:50:56):
And that's what I've learned about people.

Speaker 3 (01:50:58):
There's levels, and there's different It's like different kinds of songs.
There's hymns, there's lullabies, there's concer thos, there's symphonies, there's
instrumental vehicles for improvisation. And you go to this person
when it's like we connect in this way when we
want to play straight no chaser and take thirteen minute

(01:51:20):
excurageon like and we connect in a very deep way
in that regard. So for me, I've not limited the
experience of relationship with people and the connectivity that can
exist the cross the spectrum of humanity for me and
for other people, just because maybe there's one aspect of

(01:51:40):
my life or my identity that they don't have access to. Now,
that doesn't mean that you have to also know how
to protect yourself and your integrity and integraty the things
you believe and to hold the line with that and
certain things certain people shouldn't have actscess too, I'll say

(01:52:00):
it like that, Okay, so that that's true as well.
And you have to know what that is for you,
and they have to know what that is for them,
And that really doesn't have anything to do with you
other than what it is, what's yours. You have to
know how to My father's really my father and my
mother in a different different ways of both you know,

(01:52:23):
they really instilled that in me, in the sense of,
you know, don't you're not trying to be liked by everybody.
In fact, that's not even a consideration. Yes, you should
give everybody a benefit of a doubt. You should try
to be able to connect with people and look at
them as a human being first, and that's what I'm saying.

(01:52:45):
But that's not the same thing as trying to be
liked by everybody or be accepted by everybody. My dad
is probably the smartest person that I know, and my
mom is the most principled and extremely where I get
my curiosity from. She's still learning new skills now in retirement.
And just the different ways that they embody that it's

(01:53:08):
like you don't have to like me, and that also
ends relationships or it deepens them. It becomes like well,
if you don't value this, to value that, it's not
a matter of me keeping it from you. Are you
not you thinking you're my best friend and not really

(01:53:30):
knowing me or not truly knowing the depth of where
I stand or who I am. No, I don't hide that.
It becomes a thing where it typically activates a different
level of the connection.

Speaker 1 (01:53:44):
Okay, circling back and finishing up. What is your pre
show routine? How do you get psyched up to the
degree you do psych yourself up to go on stage?
And how much is outlined? I mean, I've been to
c household name acts on tour. We're literally the set
list is on the lamited Okay, so you're out there.

(01:54:09):
To what degree is what happens on stage is unexpected
to you?

Speaker 3 (01:54:15):
It's different every night. Every time. I thrive on that.
I thrive on shifting gears in the middle. I'll make
a set list, I'll change it in the middle of
the show. Sometimes I won't make a set list. Mostly
I'll make set lists for the band. I don't really
like set lists. I've never been a fan of in
ear monitors. Sometimes the band will wear in ears, other

(01:54:36):
times I'll wear them and enjoin them. But most of
the time I'm not wearing in ears. I'm feeling the
vibrations of the space and the musicians. Sometimes I wear
one ear in and the other ear out, just you
know that that's just an example of you know, one
thing we did for the first few shows of this tool,

(01:54:57):
we didn't have monitors or in ears. We just played
with two side fills, two speakers on the stage pointing
at the band, and we all shared one mix. And
you know, that made it where we had to depend
on each other and we had to follow each other
in the moment and figure out what's the next thing
we're gonna play, and how we're gonna play it, and
where's it going.

Speaker 2 (01:55:17):
And I thrive on that. You know. I've also been
one who has made shows where every second of the
show is every segment is like a beat, and it's
almost like paced to the second, to where if things
happen any other way, the sequence of the show won't

(01:55:40):
have the.

Speaker 3 (01:55:41):
Impact that I know it will have, just based on
how I know people will respond. Now, there are segments
in some of the shows where maybe like a fifteen
or twenty minute segment in a two hour show that's
like that, and I'll map it out and i'll think
about it beforehand if I'm like on the plane, or

(01:56:01):
I'll like map it out and i'll like feel it
in my body. And then i'll teach it to the
band and we'll learn it and we'll drill it, and
then that segment of the show, I know is like
that's ironclad, that's not going to change, and I know
what the impact that it's probably gonna be before and
after it, So then I'll like frame it with improvisation
the whole time. Okay, So so there's like many different

(01:56:22):
ways that I approach the performances.

Speaker 2 (01:56:26):
But yeah, I and I can do both. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:56:32):
One I guess you call it like more of a
classical approach through composed and then the other is this
sort of spiritualist like you almost like a shaman in
the space or a great great pastor you know, like
the greatest showman. I oftentimes think about the connection between
the you know, the circus tent and the revival tent.

(01:56:53):
You know, there's just kind of connectivity of that and
tent culture and and and.

Speaker 2 (01:57:01):
Yeah, man, I'm trying not to go on tangents so much.

Speaker 3 (01:57:03):
The thing about my therapy is now my thoughts to
just spill out of my mouth, but.

Speaker 2 (01:57:08):
They're even going.

Speaker 3 (01:57:09):
There's more that are in my mind that I'm not
I'm trying to like put it into nice answers bite
size for the press.

Speaker 1 (01:57:17):
I will tell you this, You're much more organized than
you think you are. You tend to circle back to
the next point, and you're digressing less. I don't know
what's going on in your brain, but it does not
perceive this scattershot on this end, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:57:37):
Well, I'm grateful to hear that, you know, I'm just
like it's it's.

Speaker 3 (01:57:46):
It's such a beautiful gift for for for for me
to have the opportunity to to share music with people
on stage and in a way that makes they were
really value and it really makes their life a little
bit better.

Speaker 2 (01:58:04):
And it also for me.

Speaker 3 (01:58:07):
The flip side of that is in the show, I
can be so exhausted and nervous and overstimulated and just
piled on, and in the show something will happen that
can't be played. It's not in the set list. It's

(01:58:27):
just the endless variety of the creator. And it will
be this therapeutic expression for me that then reaches people
on the deepest level in the show, and that is
ultimately what I'm looking for in every show, even when
I map out the beats and I make something that

(01:58:48):
is like because I don't even like the idea of
playing songs in the show. That's another reason why it's
hard for me to really I've had to learn how
to form my mind around the idea of a song
and promoting songs and writing songs because I've always thought
about music and live performance in particular, and being an

(01:59:09):
artist in that regard and seeing myself as a front person,
as someone who's creating moments with music. So that could
mean there could be ten songs in the span of
two minutes, or that could mean we could play one
song for ten minutes, or that could mean we could
deconstruct the song in a way that you know what
is what I appreciate about bands like Fish, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (01:59:32):
The jam band World or whatever you want to call that.

Speaker 3 (01:59:35):
But like and my cousin, you know, Russell, my late cousin,
Russell Baptiste Junor played in the Meters and played in
that world. I would constantly beat under his drum throne
watching him play in that kind of space, but just
in generous idea of a song and a set list
of songs and like, let me play my song. I

(01:59:57):
understand the power of that, the value that that That's
just never really been me. It's about how do I
put and create a moment. And I use song to
illustrate a message and create a moment and build an
atmosphere that we can all step into. And then that
moment is explosive in a way that I think a

(02:00:23):
song would limit.

Speaker 2 (02:00:24):
A song capture you in a different way.

Speaker 3 (02:00:26):
That's like somebody speaking to your heart and you and
you and artists, like a song is like a friend,
whereas a moment is you're cultivating a space. It's like heaven. Uh,
It's just it's so difficult for me to explain in
music terms. But that's what I want to do in

(02:00:47):
the live show and that's what we've been doing and
hopefully we'll continue to do.

Speaker 1 (02:00:53):
Well. It's been heaven talking to you. I mean, I
got a lot of conversations that are not stimulating for
people who are very base, Dick, but you're a deep thinker.
I love talking to you, and I know my audience
will enjoy this. So thanks so much John.

Speaker 3 (02:01:08):
Oh Man, thank your so my voice is so low
I'm like, oh thanks man.

Speaker 1 (02:01:16):
Okay, until next time. This is Bob left six