Beethoven Blues

The multi-award-winning pianist, singer-songwriter and TV personality Jon Batiste has the musical world at his feet. A Juilliard-trained jazz pianist who made his name as the bandleader on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, he has played with everyone from Prince to Beyoncé, won record-breaking numbers of Grammy awards (five alone in 2022) and picked up an Academy Award along the way, for his music for the 2021 Disney/Pixar movie Soul. So you have to ask why, of all the music he could turn his talents to, has he decided on Beethoven? “Oh, my goodness!” replies Batiste. “The endless amounts of integration, ingenuity, whether it’s from an orchestral perspective or compositional perspective, just the range of different innovation,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “That, coupled with the appeal of his music across generations, and across different spectrums of music listeners—whether you are a classical music listener, whether you’re a person of faith, whether you’re a child, whether you sing in a choir, whether you’re an amateur pianist—is a rare air. Beethoven occupies rare air in terms of the canon.” But this is not Beethoven as you know it: in Batiste’s hands, the late 18th/early 19th-century German Romantic composer’s repertoire is reimagined through the idioms of jazz and blues improvisation. Rapid blue-note runs add fireworks to the famous Für Elise; the theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony stomps and swings; while the Symphony No. 7’s slow movement (“7th Symphony Elegy”) takes us seamlessly from stride rhythms to shuffle. Think of it as a blues journey: “In the ‘Waldstein Wobble’, you have the boogie-woogie, then you have the stride, then you have the up-tempo gospel stomp and shout music, and then it goes into this sort of plagal, choral-like church rendering of the theme,” explains Batiste. “And later it goes into a more contemporary blues space, like what you might hear from Chick Corea, that sort of a Return to Forever sort of space.” Typically, then, Batiste won’t be pinned down to one genre or style; but “if I wanted to classify my sound, one of the pillars of it would be new age blues piano,” he says. You can hear it in his Keith Jarrett-like take on Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, a realisation that picks up from where Lauryn Hill’s gospel rendition in Sister Act 2 left off. And it’s there, too, in the three original works on this album that are more loosely Beethoven-inspired: “Dusklight Movement”, which evokes the pathos of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata with Arvo Pärt-like arpeggios; the Jarrett-infused spontaneous improvisation, “Life Of Ludwig”; and the lyrical melancholy of the theme from his American Symphony, a work that became the focus of a 2023 documentary charting its journey from conception to world premiere at the Carnegie Hall. “I want to extend on Beethoven’s music,” reveals Batiste. “I know some people will clutch their pearls to hear that, but I think it’s a beautiful thing. “I hear the blues in Beethoven’s music, even though the blues wasn’t codified as a form yet,” he says. “I hear rhythmic influences in his music that through the diaspora led to the blues, that led to gospel music. Was he conscious of it in the way that we are today, and thinking, ‘Oh, this is a blues inflection’? No, he wasn’t, because it wasn’t invented yet. But he was drawing from such a wide palette of musical influence, that there are connections to be made now that couldn’t have been made then. “That’s the beauty of being an artist in the 21st century. You have such a rich tradition, and such a cultural inheritance to play with. If you have the imagination to hear it, and the technical facility to pull it off, then you can make things a reality that never existed before.”