Tomorrow, Sunday, September 27th, I’m going to the Hollywood Bowl with 17,000 other people to see an artist I somehow didn’t discover until the last few years. Shame on me.
Jon Batiste has been serving up joy his whole career, and I’d been missing out. He was doing it on subway platforms, in the streets, in films, on TV stages, and in museums. And long before any of that, as a kid growing up in one of New Orleans’ great musical families.
He released his first album at 17, then went to Juilliard. There, he and some classmates wanted to play for people who might never set foot inside a concert hall. The piano wasn’t practical for roaming the streets of New York, so he slung a melodica over his shoulder, his little ‘harmonabord’, and led impromptu parades that swept people up as he went. He called them “love riots.”
If you’re Jon Batiste and you spend enough time carrying a harmonabord around New York, you’re bound to run into some interesting people.
Like Stevie Wonder.
While Batiste was still a Juilliard student, he met Stevie Wonder backstage at a Central Park concert. Batiste brought his harmonibord and asked Wonder if he’d ever played one. Wonder took it, played it, and handed it back.”Yeah, I used to play them, but I would get so much spit in them, I stopped.
“Note to self: don’t let anyone else play your harmonabord. Not even Stevie Wonder.
Wonder would later give Batiste another, considerably more useful, piece of advice: “Don’t let anybody take your joy away.”
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