Zitat des Tages von Jon Batiste:
I played with Prince in 2010... the America tour. The one with Misty Copeland dancing on top of the piano! But Prince played the piano on that song. But I played two dates with him on that tour. When we played the gig, every couple of songs, Prince would change his clothes.
Whatever I do with music, I try to make it align deeply with the values and principles of who I am and what I believe the purpose of my life is.
There's a tradition - in New Orleans it still exists - where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.
I'm from Kenner, Louisiana, where music is played for every occasion in life. There's music for being born, there's music for dying... It's just natural. Families get really good because they play a lot together.
The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it's still jazz.
I think it's important for people to stay human and remember that genuine human connection is more fulfilling than anything that technology has to offer. We all have it within us, and music is something that can bring that out of us.
In the process of them developing this instrument, I've been playing the melodica in the style I would like the harmoniboard to be played, which is a mix between a harmonica and keyboard. I play with trumpet style techniques. I really like the mobility of being able to step off the piano and bring the music to the audience.
We played Carnegie Hall, and that was one time where I felt... Carnegie Hall as a legendary, very venerable place to perform. I'd never heard of anyone going into the Hall and kind of standing on the seats and playing throughout the aisles and having the audience stand on the seats. So when we did that in 2013, even for me it was a shock.
The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.
Jazz can accommodate so many things. Jazz is like the universe: it's been expanding since its creation, and it's connected to everything.
We are in a technological age, and 'Social Music' aims to reflect that spirit of advancement, collaboration and connectivity while still remaining 'human.' And Stay Human, then, is a reminder of what connects us all. It's our mantra.
When the Beatles wrote 'Paperback Writer,' it couldn't have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it's not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.
Imagine if you grew up in a place where your lineage was there for a hundred years, and part of the culture was to play music 50 percent of the time. You'd probably have a lot of musicians in your family too.
Music is a tool that brings people together.
With so many ways to communicate at our disposal, we must not forget the transformative power of a live music experience and genuine human exchange.
You can't hate the person next to you when you're laughing and dancing together.
On the road, you can't really develop a personal life.
It's not like the old competition that you had between Leno and Letterman. It's a friendly competition between Fallon and Stephen.
I'm always about trying to fill a need with what I do in my artistry. There is definitely a need in the performing arts world for a movement to come along that seriously connects with a next generation audience while still maintaining the timeless artistic objectives present throughout the history of the American music tradition.
There were so many people after that first 'Colbert Report' interview that were impressed by the synergy we had during the interview. People everywhere we'd go would say, 'You should be the bandleader; it would be great for jazz. It would be great for the music.' But I was completely against it.
I have seven uncles, and my dad played bass, they had a band together, that was the family band. And of course as the cousins got older, including myself, we joined a family band. All the cousins played. That's my heritage.
Technology is something you have to embrace because technology is part of our generation. Digital natives, for instance, are people who grew up in a world that always had the Internet and who always had smartphones. Millennials aren't too far behind: my generation of people, who were in the mix of the Internet when it first came out.
