This week Inside the Hive welcomes special guest Jon Batiste, leader of the band Stay Human on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Hot off his Golden Globe win for his work on the score of Pixar’s Soul, Batiste’s latest album, We Are, represents a vivid turn from straight jazz to joyful, danceable pop and neo-soul. It’s also a bold declaration of conscience: Catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter movement of last summer, when he rallied protesters with an ad hoc street band, Batiste wanted to deliver a personal statement on his own experience as a Black man in America. “We have to hold ourselves accountable to the things that we profess to believe,” he says.
Batiste collaborated with 200 musicians, producers, and friends, including Quincy Jones, Mavis Staples, and even author Zadie Smith, with whom he held regular singing sessions over Zoom at the height of the pandemic. Here, he recounts his own musical evolution—from Louisiana, where he grew up in a storied musical family, to New York, where he studied jazz and classical piano at Juilliard and developed what he’s come to call “social music,” a sound that draws on Duke Ellington and Stevie Wonder, Wu-Tang Clan, and even Björk to find a common humanity in a time of division.
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