Black Mozart

“Improvisation, which people associate with jazz, was fundamental to classical music,” Jon Batiste tells Apple Music Classical. The American singer, songwriter, composer, pianist and musical all-rounder, former bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, is on a mission to restore spontaneity to the classics. Black Mozart, successor to his Beethoven Blues album, sees Batiste engage in a deeply personal solo dialogue with works composed around 250 years ago. Mozart’s music, he says, is eternally modern, always momentous and undeniably universal. “Mozart was a grand improviser,” notes Batiste. “He would frequently perform entirely spontaneous compositions, things that were left open for his gift for improvisation. Many of his great works were formed from improvisations that were then codified into a written score. The honour of your work is when it becomes something that people take forward and are in conversation with in their own ways—they extend it, they bend it, they twist it. As the years go by and people continue to be in conversation with it, the melodies become ubiquitous, and even the composer takes a back seat to the discourse around their work, enriching folks long after they’re gone.” Black Mozart draws its title from Batiste’s re-imaginings of the composer from the perspective of Black American music. The album, he says, is like an open exchange with Mozart’s compositions. “I believe the great classical canon of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach and all those who we study and play has reached the point where it’s ripe for interpolation, reinvention and an update with all of the great cultural and musical traditions that have happened since their time. We’ve had the blues, we’ve had jazz, we’ve had all types of contemporary forms which they did not have the benefit of incorporating into their work. And we also need to rediscover the spirit and utility of improvisation in classical music.” The seeds of the latter project were planted in Batiste’s creative consciousness decades ago by his distant cousin, the legendary jazz clarinettist Alvin Batiste, part of a remarkable dynasty of New Orleans musicians. “Without knowing it, he was one of my introductions to reinventing classical music,” he recalls. Hearing Alvin’s reinvention of one of his beloved Mozart melodies in the form of a 12-bar blues transformed young Jon’s view of the composer’s music as “stuffy”, an impression only reinforced by his deep immersion in the seemingly more vigorous, weightier works of Bach and Beethoven. There’s a playfulness to Batiste’s Mozart and bags of wit, too. Listen to “Facile-Batiste”, where he adds gentle jazz decorations to the opening movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major, K. 545 before interrupting the flow with a free fantasy built above simple repeated chords. Or follow the melodic thread that links “Shine” to “Twinkle”, both based on Mozart’s Variations on “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman” (a tune better known as “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”). “Alla Blues” moves from free improvisation to a more formal take on Mozart’s “Rondo alla turca”, while “Country Zart” plugs the The Marriage of Figaro Overture into the pulsating power source of Black country music. It’s clear that Batiste’s Black Mozart improvisations are entirely authentic to his own way of making music. “It’s about being reverent to the canon while finding a way to authentically express your artistry,” he says. “That’s the mandate of the modern musician.” Mozart, he adds, would surely have woven the diverse elements of today’s music into his compositions. “It would be incredible to hear what he would do with all the genres there are now.” Spontaneity was key to Black Mozart. Unlike Bach and Beethoven, whose music Batiste has played since childhood, he came fresh to Mozart, playing through pieces and improvising his response to key themes and ideas on the day of recording. “Mozart didn’t have much of an appeal to the young Jon Batiste,” he admits. “I moved toward it while I was thinking about my Batiste Piano Series. When I recorded Beethoven, I was almost down the road of recording Mozart Blues instead. I’d known his music since being a kid and had grown to understand what he was doing as a composer. But this album was my first foray into interpreting his music. On that one day, I went to the school of Mozart. It was about taking him as my starting point and finding a portal into something authentic within you that extends the conversation. That’s the name of the game.”