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On his latest release, Chronology of a Dream: Live at the Village Vanguard, the musician, singer, composer, bandleader and Late Show With Stephen Colbert musical director Jon Batiste takes his concept of “celestial jazz”, and his masterful compositional prowess to the world’s most iconic jazz club. It’s a follow-up to the acclaimed Anatomy of Angels: Live at the Village Vanguard, released in August, which found Batiste and company immersed in his concepts of “celestial jazz” and “melodious atonality”, fluidly navigating demanding shifts in form, time and harmony while channeling the divine. “Chronology contrasts Angels, but both albums are steeped in the same musical and spiritual concepts. They are two sides of the same coin. In fact, they were recorded at the same time and arranged into separate albums after the fact so that listeners would have two contrasting experiences within the same musical landscape” Batiste explains. “My compositions on Chronology focus on thematic development within short form structures with memorable melodic themes, while Angels focuses on thematic development within longer form structures that are built for deconstruction, never to be played the same way twice.”
But just as Angels balanced its intellectual depth with plenty of emotional depth—see Lake Street Dive singer Rachael Price’s guest vocal on “The Very Thought of You”—Chronology features healthy doses of poignancy, zeal and exaltation, including a heartrending performance of “SOULFUL,” a little-known composition by Batiste’s late musical hero Roy Hargrove.
Coming full circle, Batiste found himself at the helm of a band of the young lions last November, coming together to document his own masterful compositions, contribute to the lineage of black music and pay homage his late hero. Both Angels and Chronology are timely recordings that showcase his eminence as a composer, bandleader, and pianist, while also giving the listener an invitation to deepen their divine humanity. Batiste concept of “celestial jazz” is incredibly deep, provocative, and even borders on the prophetic, giving us a window into the future of where the music is going, and more importantly, where it could go.
Life & Work
Bio:
Born in Kenner, Louisiana (check the opening instrumental, “Kenner Boogie”) Batiste is a member of one of the biggest and most important musical families of the New Orleans area. He started playing drums with the Batiste Brothers Band at age 8, before switching to piano a few years later.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).