Jon Batiste: World Music Radio review – safety-first global pop from a jazz superstar
You might have imagined that Jon Batiste’s triumph at the 2022 Grammy awards would be greeted with delight. He won more gongs than anyone else: five in total, becoming the first Black artist to win album of the year, for 2021’s We Are, in 14 years. Here was a virtuoso musician who existed on the margins of the mainstream – bestknown as the bandleader on Stephen Colbert’s talkshow and the author of the “user-friendly jazz songs” from the Disney film Soul – hoisted into the spotlight by dint of his talent alone.
Instead, his success was more ambivalently received. Batiste, the naysayers suggested, was was a safe choice, more redolent of the past than the musical present. We Are had abandoned the traditionalist jazz found on his previous album, 2018’s Hollywood Africans, in favour of soul with a distinct retro flavour. Batiste, one writer complained, wasn’t “someone at the forefront of this century’s defining hip-hop and R&B sounds”.
Listening to World Music Radio, you wonder whether that criticism lodged with Batiste, whether he was keen to use his increased profile – in addition to his Grammy haul, the Soul OST won him an Oscar and a Golden Globe – as a platform to reach a wider audience, or if he is just unwilling to repeat himself. For whatever reason, We Are’s followup is a markedly different beast to its predecessor. It posits Batiste as a very 21st century kind of artist: pop-facing, unafraid of things that Julliard-trained jazz musicians tend to look askance at, among them AutoTune and cravenly manufactured pop. Instead of Trombone Shorty and Mavis Staples, it features K-pop quartet NewJeans, Lana Del Rey and Leigh-Anne Pinnock of Little Mix, part of a supporting cast