He's got soul...
Jon Batiste, the new judge on The Piano, says he can spot a winner just from the way they walk
Channel 4
- Pete Paphides
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in April 2025.
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It’s not hard to tell when Jon Batiste is excited. As he rocks back on his chair, his long legs rear up and, as they do so, his even longer arms follow suit. Watch it on television and you imagine, just out of shot, his limbs being controlled by a giant puppeteer. And, as he joins the third season of Channel 4’s The Piano as a new judge, the sight of an excited Jon Batiste is about to become a pleasingly frequent one.
The 38-year-old American singer/songwriter and virtuoso pianist says the prospect of replacing classical legend Lang Lang to join fellow judge Mika and host Claudia Winkleman on the hugely successful show was “a total no-brainer” – so much so that he didn’t watch a single episode before agreeing to participate.
This afternoon, he’s speaking from the basement studio of the Brooklyn home he shares with his wife, the writer Suleika Jaouad – whose Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times movingly chronicled her fight against leukaemia – and their dog Lentil. Various Grammys (he has seven in total) and the Oscar and Bafta for his work on the Pixar animated film Soul can be seen in spaces not already taken up by crockery, “thrifted” ornaments and vinyl records.
Mika, Jon Batiste and Claudia Winkleman. Channel 4
To Batiste’s long-time fans, his arrival on a show in which unknown musicians are let loose on pianos in train stations across the country won’t seem like quite such a left-field development. “I come from a family where music is something that happens in public locations – on the street, in the subway, you name it.”
What Batiste modestly calls a family, others might term a dynasty. His grandfather was the avant-garde clarinettist Alvin Batiste, who taught many of the most celebrated American jazz musicians of the past hundred years. The younger Batiste grew up in the shadow of New Orleans brass bands, whose ranks were dotted with several musicians from his immediate and extended family.
Only through the piano could I truly express who I was
Aged eight, Batiste felt “like I was observing the world rather than participating in it”. For a time, the pressure of expectation overwhelmed him. Nothing truly made sense until, at the age of 11, his mother suggested he switch from percussion to piano. “Only at that point could I truly start to express who I was.”
Given his own history, it’s perhaps no surprise that Batiste’s most memorable responses in the new series of The Piano happen when younger pianists take to the podium. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, we see 17-year-old Mia from south London talking about how, at the age of 11, she googled “black, female composers because no one else who looked like me seemed to be [playing classical piano]”. When she plays Troubled Water, Margaret Bonds’s piano piece based on an African-American spiritual, the power of what Batiste is hearing visibly runs through him like an electric current.
Anisa, 12, is intuitively tipped for the finale by Jon Batiste. Channel 4
In Brighton, when 12-year-old Marcus plays his own composition, Batiste has to run out and greet him. “How you learn that?!” he asks him. “You!” replies a starstruck Marcus, a longtime Batiste fan.
Once again, this format – piano, train station, TV crew, Claudia – seems to yield stories you’d struggle to believe if someone wrote them in a script. Take, for instance, Zak from Chapeltown in Leeds – infamous for its history of social deprivation and race riots – who plays Chopin like a dream and hymns the beauty of C sharp minor because that’s the key that most mirrors “what it feels like to live around here”.
When 12-year-old Anisa walks towards the piano, we see Batiste turn to Mika and pronounce her a candidate for the series finale. When I ask him how he could truly know that someone is about to blow him away before they’ve played a note, Batiste talks passionately about how it’s important to stop “intellectualism” silencing the “deep intuitive sensors that exist within all of us. It can be the way someone holds their instrument or something in the way they speak that is transmitting something that will inevitably come through the music.”
You might think Batiste is almost a bit too cool to be taking part in a Channel 4 reality show – but the historical distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is something for which he has zero tolerance. A self-styled “computer game nut”, he learnt piano by transcribing the music from the video game Final Fantasy VII – and during his time leading the house band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he performed music from that game and Song of Storms from The Legend of Zelda.
Speaking about his new sidekick on The Piano, Mika tells RT: “Jon has managed to evade being pinned down, and that is what makes him so thrilling. Even though sometimes he could be a real pain in the ass, I know he’s such an artistic genius that I forgive him!”
If Batiste is aware of his charm, it doesn’t diminish it. In fact, you suspect it’s that very awareness that recently gave him the moxie to stare straight into the barrel of a camera broadcasting to 127 million viewers when he delivered a jazz blues version of The Star-Spangled Banner at the US Super Bowl, with Donald Trump in attendance. What was in his thoughts as he sang those words? “In that moment? You just have to focus on what you represent. I’m walking in the shoes of a lot of different singers, who have performed that song there. They’re all pieces in the same puzzle.”
I come from a family where music happens in public locations
Get Batiste onto the musicians who shaped his outlook, and you momentarily see the child still wondering how he can match up. Louis Armstrong is “one of the most
fully aligned human beings in history… and the greatest jazz musician of all time.” Nina Simone is “the bravest and most underrated American artist of the 20th century, whose approach was so ahead of its time that its time has only just begun”. Batiste extends his hand to some imagined star through the stained-glass windows of his studio, indicating the place these artists hold in the pantheon of greats. “They had someone at the outset who believed in their gift,” he explains, “and perhaps I can be that person for the musicians I mentor on The Piano.”
Jon Batiste. Douglas Mason/Getty Images
The process clearly took a lot out of him. If he commits to another series, he’d like the opportunity to show more of the “interactive community-based” side to his personality. That means “less time eating Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls in the back office of a train station and more dialogue with the actual musicians”. During filming, did he ever consider which song he would pick as his younger self stepping off the train and walking towards that piano for the first time?
Silence. Jon Batiste pauses, and imagines himself at the age of 20, fresh out of Juilliard, trying to find an audience for his first compositions. “Do you know My Song by Labi Siffre?” Not for the first time, he picks up the blue melodica that he seems to use as something tantamount to a fidget spinner, and plays a few lines from it.
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Later that evening, I play back the audio and find the equivalent section from Siffre’s actual recording: “I wonder/If you know what it means/To find your dreams come true/This is my song/And no one can make it a lie.” You suspect Batiste had thought about the answer long before anyone asked him the question.
Authors
Pete Paphides
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