The Genius of Jon Batiste and What It Means "To Be Woke"

As told by a humbled white guy trying to get the most of out life while I still can

Music is an incredibly important part of my life. Lately, Jon Batiste has been taking up a lot of my listening time, and with good reason. Now, if you don’t know who Jon Batiste is, you should. I mean, it’s pretty hard to not at least know of him these days. The guy is everywhere, from his band, Stay Human, being the house band for the Late Show, to being the music director of the Atlantic magazine, to concerts and touring. And his ubiquity is for a good reason: he’s a genius at what he does. That’s not just at making incredible music, either, but to do things with music unlike anyone else around today. I liken him to Michael Jordan - a person outside of the time in which he is living having a unique and lasting impact on his craft.

The latest two works of his that I’ve come across - his relatively new, all piano album, Beethoven’s Blues, and a one-song study of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” - are both remarkable. In both cases, he has found the courage to take some of the most beloved music known, and, right before our ears and eyes, deconstruct them, then play with them and rebuild them. He does so all the while holding on to the original’s intent and strength. It’s not unlike a lot of jazz in that regard, where the main theme is stated and then things go where the artist takes them. It is how he does it, however, that shows a degree of thoughtfulness and connection to the original music that a lot of jazz misses. I highly suggest listening to them both.

All this gushing aside, it’s taken some time for me to be able to open my ears, my mind, and my heart to artists like Batiste. Artists of color, that is. And I’m still not perfect. You see, I grew up in a relatively conservative military family in the South. I had friends who were racist. I learned racism. In my gut, I knew something wasn’t right, but because I didn’t have a lot of instruction or modeling to the contrary, I didn’t recognize what. I didn’t get that what I was experiencing was racism. I didn’t know anything different. It was just…life.

Examples of the racism I learned were many, from a teacher bringing to class what he called “a friends’” Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, to confederate flags being present almost everywhere. With respect to music, specifically, I remember friends dismissing black artists, saying that wasn’t good because they were, well, black artists. Or occasionally a white artist would be “trying to sound black,” and that would equal a dismissal of them.

Oddly enough, the term "black artists" and the like didn't even register with me as being racist. It was just a description, another category that was ok not to like, like country. In my bubble, I didn’t know. And, to show my age, this was in the early days of cable TV starting to be everywhere, so there wasn’t much ease of access to learn anything else. The Dukes of Hazzard in all its confederate flag glory was hugely popular. As an avid comic book collector when I was young, I read G.I. Combat, a DC comics title that featured the ghost of confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, a man who was a traitor the United States and who participated in the genocide of the indigenous people of this continent. The TV show COPS showed, primarily, black people as the criminals. And on and on.

It took me a while to unpack that. It took me a while to open my ears, my mind and my heart. It took education, but even then, while intellectually I understood what discrimination was, it didn’t really click. It took me making mistakes, saying and doing incredibly stupid things, and being called out for it. It took me traveling the world for work and life and being held up as responsible for some of the awful foreign policies of the United States, such as the invasion of Iraq. And what it finally took, what really lead to the big “ah-hah” moment, what lead to my being born again, what lead to my awakening, what lead to my becoming woke, was becoming a father of a child with a congenital disability.

Despite my lack of understanding about the various forms of discrimination, I had learned in my life to try to see things from other’s perspectives. I thought I was pretty good at it, but it wasn’t until I had to see things through my child’s eyes, to see what she was facing, that I truly got it on a core belief kind of level. And so I am woke. And I’m proud of that.

So when people say being woke is stupid, or wrong, or say or do something that is hurtful or wrong simply based on the color of one’s skin, or their gender, or their country of origin, or religion, or disability, I can now articulate the reasons why that’s wrong in a way that people understand. “Walk a day in the shoes of a black man trying to get a job to see the discrimination he faces,” I say. “Walk a day in the shoes of a woman walking alone to her car to see the fear she faces,” I say. “Walk a day in my daughter’s shoes to see the challenges she faces,” I say. Quite simply, being woke doesn’t mean anything more than having understanding, compassion, and empathy for others on a wider scale. It’s about asking questions. It’s about being open to truths and realities other than one’s own.

With respect to music and black artists and Jon Batiste, my learned behavior from my youth still haunts me, like the ghost of J.E.B. Stuart himself is still there. I have noticed over the years that I will still, far more frequently than for white artists, have a negative reaction to the music of black people. I wish I didn’t and I continue to work so that I won’t someday, but, thankfully, I am able, at least, to catch myself and say, “Stop. Listen openly. Open your heart.” And my life is so much richer for it. So when I first saw and heard Batiste a few years ago, I thought, "he's weird, I don't like him." Then I checked myself: "Oh, hey, lookit that. You're being racist again."

As I said, I now listen to Batiste regularly. He is, without a doubt, one of the most talented and creative and fearless and simply wonderful artists of our time. I saw him in concert recently, and in the middle of an evening weekend concert at a giant outdoor amphitheater, he took time out of the show to do a couple songs for the kids. I’ve been to a lot of concerts, and unless the concert was specifically billed as “kid friendly” (his was not), I’ve never seen that. Genius. And my daughter loved it.