Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
This is Tim Farris and welcome to another episode of The Tim Farris Show.
This isn't just any episode.
This one turned out really, really special.
And I really encourage everybody to listen to this once as audio only if you are listening to this without any video, but also go to YouTube .com slash Tim Farris to ask us to see the video.
We recorded this episode in the recording studio designed by Jimi Hendrix, where he slept.
The acoustics, the surroundings, everything is gorgeous.
And my guest was in the flow.
We happened to mesh really well together.
And it's one of those episodes that I will remember for many years.
My guest, John Batiste, is a five time Grammy Award winning and Academy Award winning singer, songwriter and composer.
I met him ages and ages ago, back when he was a mere incredible, incredible musician, composer, etc.
But I've been able to watch him become the marquee lights, John Batiste, and it has been a thrill to watch.
We talk about it all his eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues, is set for a November 15th release.
When we are sitting in Jimi Hendrix's studio, there are pianos, guitars, you name it, and we don't just talk.
We walk around and he uses music to answer some of my questions.
It's phenomenal. Beethoven Blues marks the first installment in his solo piano series, showcasing Batiste's interpretation of Beethoven's iconic works, reimagined.
And that is an understatement.
You're going to hear a lot of it in this episode towards the last 25 percent.
So buckle up and stick around.
Beethoven Blues follows Batiste's studio album World Music Radio, which received five Grammy nominations, including album of the year.
As a composer, he scored Jason Reitman's Saturday Night Now in theaters.
The film depicts the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live's very first broadcast in 1975, underscored by Batiste blending of jazz, classical and contemporary elements.
He composed and produced the music live on set, capturing the intensity of the show's debut.
He also appears in the film as Billy Preston, the show's first musical guest and certainly he has lived that out himself.
Additionally, Batiste composed and performed music for the Disney Pixar film Soul, for which he won an Academy Award for best original score alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
You can find him at johnbatiste .com.
That's J -O -N -B -A -T -I -S -T -E dot com on Instagram and socials at johnbatiste.
And boy, oh boy, I love this.
I really think you guys are in for a treat.
Stick around, listen to the whole thing.
Watch it a second time on video at youtube .com slash Tim Ferriss.
So we're going to get to the good stuff.
But first, just a few words from those who make this podcast possible.
The following quote is from one of the most legendary entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley.
And here it goes. This team executes at a level you rarely see, even among the best technology companies.
End quote. That is from Peter Thiel about today's sponsor, Ramp.
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This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.
I have been using 8Sleep Pod Cover for years now.
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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I ask you a personal question?
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
I need Tim Ferris. The snow monkeys in Japan figured it out, so we've been doing it a long time.
Yeah. They just hang out in the hot springs.
Did you ever go to a place in Japan, Okinawa?
I've spent time there because I lived in Japan.
Yeah, I know. Yeah, so I've been to Okinawa.
I have culturally super different from the rest of Japan.
It's cool. I can't wait to go.
I wanted to ask you if you had been.
I'd never been, but I've always wanted to just go there and like spend a long period of time, like months.
Yeah. I feel like it could change you.
I think it could in part because I asked everybody down there because the Okinawans have so many 100 plus senior citizens.
They live a long time, or at least they used to.
And I asked every person I met, what's the secret?
And they all had a different answer, which is pretty adorable.
But the one constant was they were all active.
I had a driver who was helping us out.
He considered himself young.
He was 85. And we would drive and he'd point to the retirement homes and he'd say, that's where you go to die.
That's when you stop.
He's like, as soon as you sit on the couch and start watching TV, it's over.
And we would go to the farmer's markets and you'd see people who are at 98, 103, walking around, shopping, tending garden, active.
They're still engaged.
That's absolutely incredible because all of those things you think of are mundane and that you were trying to get away from doing.
Exactly. That's what I'm trying to retire from.
Yeah. Or I want to outsource that, which that almost becomes a way of life.
It's like a philosophy.
Yeah, totally. I remember I was reading different books by Kurt Vonnegut, who's one of my favorite writers.
Oh, yeah, Kurt Vonnegut.
I think it was an essay.
He was like, if people tell you the purpose of life is not to fart around, don't believe them.
He's like, I go to the post office.
I wait in line. Most people don't want to do that.
He's like, but that's the connective tissue, all those in between moments.
And if you're only celebrating the huge this, the huge that, the big events, I mean, you're missing like 98 % of your life.
Oh, man. Wow. There's something about that.
I think about, often, how do you maintain a flow state in waking life throughout the mundane?
How do you embrace the mundane and find the muse in the mundane without having to go to some sacred place?
Yeah, exactly. To take a time out.
Like I have to go and plug into something else to connect versus just being connected.
The muse in the mundane, how do you, how have you found that or how have you tried to find that?
Mistakes. All right.
Mistakes are amazing.
Mistakes are brilliant.
It's a gift to go about your day.
And for something, either a mistake or something that you didn't plan, an interruption, some seeming calamity happening, that allows for you to not only respond but to create.
And then in that moment, you have the ability to discover something that's much greater than anything that you could invent or devise, because there's something that happens with the synapses.
And the way that you respond to seeming calamity that brings you to your highest potential.
So I have to ask you about something I read when I was doing research for this, which is always fun because I get to be like a creepy stalker online for people I know, which otherwise would be very strange and uncomfortable for everybody.
And I was reading this piece from the Guardian and I want to ask about introspection because you're very reflective and I admire that.
I mean, you seem to have cultivated self -awareness and a lot of what you do.
In this Guardian piece, they said maybe that's because he didn't speak until he was 10 or something along those lines.
Did you not speak for a lot of your, I guess, childhood, given the framing that they put in the article?
Man, you know, what's amazing is those years, I don't have so many memories of those years either.
And I don't understand why I've just started to excavate that more and more in the last year, just trying to figure out what was going on.
What was the context?
And for all intensive purposes, my life has truly been blessed.
I've had such a great upbringing, but there was something about being born into the world that felt like I needed to observe before I participated.
Felt like I needed to watch what was happening and synthesize what was happening.
All the different perspectives, all the different personalities, growing around, a lot of colorful personalities, a lot of sounds and rhythms.
A lot of life force energy.
And a lot of danger.
So I think the aspect of being in all of that meeting my natural state, my innate makeup, it was deeper than introspection.
Something that I still have yet to put words to fully understand in my early years put me in a space where I was observing and gathering, observing and gathering, observing and gathering.
And then eventually it became, OK, let me emerge into a new era.
Let me try to mold some things.
And it started with music.
Let me try to mold the world around me.
Let me try to shift things and create things and influence things.
There I say. Yeah. Let me try.
In little ways, I would start and then it extended far beyond music.
What age would you say that was hard to pin down?
But. Yeah, exactly.
You already peeped it out too.
It's like it's around 14 or 15.
It was music that allowed for me to to have a opportunity to present myself on stage.
You have to present yourself in a way that is amplifying aspects of what's inside.
And ultimately you have a decision to make as a performer to decide how far between who you actually are and who you've created to project on the stage.
Are you? How big is the jump, the discrepancy between those two?
It's a choice you make.
How do you think about because I remember chatting with Andrew Zimmer and T .B.
Lewis does a lot of different things.
And he said, be very careful about and I'm paraphrasing.
He's like, be very careful about who you are in episode one, season one, because you could paint yourself into a corner where you have to be that guy now forever if it's popular.
How have you thought about that?
I thought about it from first the perspective of how do I get to a point where all that's within me, all these things that I feel, these ideas that I have, this vision becomes a reality.
So that took so much stepping outside of my comfort zone, we call it throw yourself in the water.
We would do things like when I was in college, my band and I would go in the subway and we would play for people.
We wouldn't ask for money.
We wouldn't busk. We would just play concerts for people who weren't expecting a concert to just get to the point where we were fearless about presenting art and also wanted to change the atmosphere in this community of a train station that has all these people from different walks of life now locked
in the train together.
So it's a certain aspect of winning them over that we worked on.
How do we create harmony in this scenario?
And then that extended.
Now, let's go and strike up conversation with people that we don't know and talk to them about things that they're going through.
And then let's share some things that we don't want to share that we're going through.
I have a big question for you.
I think it's really to all of this and I've wanted to ask you a lot and Molly's getting excited and stretching over here.
So I think it's a good sign.
So the question is about how to choose where you go on this quest of originality.
It seems like that was part of your life pretty early, maybe 15, 16, 17.
The phrase that keeps coming back is quest for originality.
And of course, we're all original.
We're all one of a kind.
Yes, yes. But in a saturated world and a busy world with so many facets of ourselves, you can go in a million different directions.
You have a lot of choices.
So how have you chosen which pathways to explore?
Like interacting with these people on the subway, playing some of the instruments you've played that I know were not assigned to you at Juilliard.
Yes. So how do you pick which aspects of yourself or which scent trails to explore?
You have to understand what is it that's yearning to be expressed within you.
Even if you're dreadfully afraid of it, you can have something within that seems so far away from the reality of your current state that it couldn't possibly be for you in your mind.
And every fiber of your being is telling you, this isn't what I should be pursuing.
This isn't who I am.
That's the one right there, that one right there.
The scary one. This isn't who I am.
It won't go away. Yeah, but it sticks with you and you start to say, oh, it's not going away.
Could you give an example?
Do any examples come to mind for you personally?
Oh my gosh. Well, performing for me, my first experiences with performing were traumatic at best.
I mean, the level of performance anxiety that I still have is unbelievably paralyzing to the point that I've developed mantras and different ways of reaching for what's inside and also just a greater sense of purpose in philosophy.
That really is a foundation that lifts me to the point of taking the stage and sharing it because it's bigger than oneself.
And did you feel that yearning to perform?
Was it an image? Was it a feeling?
Was that the yearning?
That was part of it.
I remember my first time on a talent show dancing, which is another aspect of it, dancing, something that I was not naturally accustomed to doing besides just that family functions.
And it wasn't something that came natural to me.
I was more of someone who was a spiritual mover versus the most precise dancer.
But I went on a talent show with my best friend.
We were in elementary school at the time and he goes on stage.
He was a very natural dancer, and he convinced me to join him on the talent show stage in front of the entire school from K through eight, the whole school, all the teachers, everybody just gathered in the auditorium.
The music starts playing.
It was like some sort of decrepit Michael Jackson beat, like Fisher Price.
It was going, man. And I get up there and I'm going.
If at this time what I knew was the running man, MC Hammer.
I remember, you know that.
Oh, but the pants parachute.
Got to be careful. Can't ride any horses with that.
But yeah, you can dance with them.
Say, ride the horse with that.
What kind of horse?
No, you got to get away from that.
I said, man, listen, let me try to run a man.
That didn't work. Everything I turned to didn't work.
Okay. Let me try to do the moonwalk.
Keon just did it, too.
That didn't work. It was a mix of cheers and laughter, both this sort of excitement by what he was doing from the audience.
And also this sort of what is wrong with this child to think that he could be up there?
I was mortified. And I remember leaving that scenario and thinking I would never, I had so many moments.
That's the thing that I remember most about performance early on.
Every moment I tried to perform, I faced rejection and left thinking, I don't ever have to do that again.
There's nothing in that for me.
Now fast forward. You know, I'm thinking about that dancing moment because it came back to me again a couple of years ago when we were at the Grammys and we were rehearsal and I'm leading this performance with 30 dancers.
And there's a moment where we all run.
The tape is probably somewhere out there, but there's a moment where we all run in place.
We break the fourth wall, we jump into the audience and we run from the stage and the vision, Jamel, McWilliams and I, we were coming up with this vision of, let's just break through the screen.
Let's break through any pretense.
Let's build an energy with our collective here, this group of us that just permeates every soul watching.
I remember even saying at some point on the stage, touch the screen, get a blessing.
It was almost like Tony Robbins motivational speech meets, you know, Baptist Church.
It was just, we got to this point where the energy, it was fierce, you know, just like a shaman, just moving the energy around.
We got to this running move and that was the launch of it all.
And I remember thinking back to when I was that kid in second grade and I was almost booed off the stage if it wasn't for Keon, right?
And I'm doing this move at the Grammys and it's happening in real time.
There's a collective life force energy that's coming from it.
And that's the thing that creating that, moments like that, moments long before that, whether it's in the subway, just creating that energy was the call.
That was what you were yearning for, was creating the energy.
That type of electricity, it's electricity, it's community.
It's what the world could be.
It's an aspirational vision of us.
I thought for a while, what is the field that I enter into to create this or to cultivate this?
What is that space?
And I didn't have words for it for many years.
And it evolves over time and it requires performance, but it's so much.
I've never shared this, but I didn't think, I mean, we're already getting deep, so why not?
Yeah, let's go for it.
But this idea has led me to places that in recent times, I don't know how much longer I will be performing or be a musician.
Why is that? I've never said that, but it's been coming up in the last, I mean, Sulayc and I have talked about it before, just because we have that type of relationship of exploring and challenging each other.
But the form of the vocation is shifting and the gift of music for me and its meaning in my life and its application within the vocation is also shifting.
Do you know where it's shifting to?
Or do you just feel the tectonic plates shifting and you're like, all right, let's pause and pay attention.
How are you experiencing that shift, that shifting?
Man, it's such an intuitive thing.
It's such a trust -based relationship.
You don't force it.
You don't force it.
You can't force it.
It just tells you when it's time.
Is that a sensitivity that you think everybody has, or do you think you have greater sensitivity to feel that?
And to sit with it, even though it might be uncomfortable to not have a compass pointing you in a certain direction.
I think those early years, coupled with now by my own volition, but when I was in college, there were times when they sent me for psychiatric evaluation.
And those early years, there may be some route to your first question about why wasn't I speaking.
There may be some route within the way that my psyche was formed.
And for me, also the superpower within that, that's allowed for me to develop a relationship with presence and with being that allows for me to trust and have faith.
And also just the natural state of an artist is to have complete faith, unwavering faith in the ability for you to make this thing real that no one sees or can experience yet but you.
And you have to do your best with words which fail to describe it, to communicate to collaborators to potentially join the ranks of building this thing, you know?
Yeah, I do. I think I want to turn this into a confessional on my part, so maybe for another time.
No, no, go for it, man.
Well, I do, there are experiences on the maybe far end of the spectrum, you have mystical experiences, which by definition are ineffable, right?
They translate very poorly to words.
And then there are these felt senses and these evolved capabilities that also pre -day language.
So it's very difficult, if not impossible, to apply clean prose to describing them.
And to that extent, I do think I feel what you're saying.
And I'm curious, as these things are taking shape in your body, in your mind, these things you feel that are not yet externalized, how much of it is waiting and how much of it is sort of tickling the muse for these original concepts or ideas or impulses?
Are there ways that you help yourself to generate or be receptive to new directions and new ideas?
You know, I was checking out Alfred Hitchcock the other night, suspense.
If you think about the device of suspense in cinema that he mastered and you experienced that through the things that he created, at least for me, that was something that brought me back to an understanding of the muse, which is this idea that suspense is created when there are stakes and when you don't
know what's going to happen on the other side.
So you then have to put everything on the line that you believe in, that motivates you, that powers you.
You have to put it on the line in order to move toward whatever your desired outcome is in a limited amount of time.
And sometimes without enough intel or intellectual processing of the information to even know which direction you want to take it in.
You just have the moment.
So for me, I love to create these pockets of suspense, these pockets of pressurized creativity or pressurized experience that leads me to discovery, that it pushes me forward.
And I think about things that are not music, like cinema, or there's so many things that are not connected to the actual craft that I draw from much, much, much more than actually thinking about the inspiration of music and the fruit of the craft itself.
So if we take a closer look at the stakes and the unknown, I'm wondering if I'm hearing you correctly because it was just a week ago, I had a conversation with a number of friends, having dinner, drinks.
And I posed a question which was, what do you do when you get stuck or you're feeling stuck and you want to push yourself in a new direction?
And there were a lot of different answers, but there was one common thread, which was, in effect, I need to book the theater.
So I write the play, a feeling of getting in over your head where you commit to something and then you figure out what that thing is going to be.
But now you have something like on the schedule, people are involved, and then you're in the dark groping around, you kind of figure it out.
And I'm wondering if you apply some version of that in your own life, if that's what in a sense, you mean by like stakes and moving into the unknown or if it takes other forms.
That was the gateway drug.
But what happens for me at this point is the zoom out and the zoom out is this perspective on all things, time, the perspective of your lineage, the understanding of your lifespan, all these things that require you to zoom out to really assess and feel in your marrow to grasp.
And it makes those commitments feel minor to me, even if they're attached to some monetary outcome or some consequence that is deemed dangerous by the way that we metrics on these things almost become so irrelevant to me that it requires me to have another motivation in order to really reach the thing
that is most impactful and most resonant within what kind of motivation motivates you these days.
So when you have the zoom out, when I come back to the creative process, it almost has to be the opposite of what it used to be, which is, you know, let me put myself in a position, throw myself in the water and figure out how I'm going to evolve and do something.
And then it eventually went to, how do I go into, how do I bridge this into a whole nother craft?
How do I create? That's why I love the idea of what we call genres, which are just silos that promote ignorance.
That's fun for me. That's not based on a truth.
So to zoom out helps you to assess all the truths, the laws.
This is what is right.
Then the motivation has to come in the opposite way of force.
It has to come almost like a dream comes to you in the night.
You can't do anything about your dreams per se, but feed the dream machine.
You can't generate the opportunity for you to have a certain dream, right?
You can perhaps interact with your dream once it arrives.
And it's so ephemeral.
Even remembering your dreams oftentimes can be difficult depending on what space you are in your life.
It makes everything that happens delicate and it makes everything that I commit to, in some ways, very tenuous when it comes to the mammoth mechanics of our industry.
And I'm getting to a point, which is a part of the realization where perhaps there's not a context within the industry and the mechanics therein that, as they exist today, that I can find true inspiration from, and that I can connect the dots of my, there's a constellation of inspiration that crosses
so many spectrums of society and I can't access it if I play by these rules.
Yeah, if you're in the silo playing by the laws and quotation marks, right?
Exactly. And the zoom out gives you such a perspective on that, that it makes you fiercely prepared for when the dream comes, because then you'll embrace it, because it's your top priority.
It's the chief motivation, but you can't make it come.
Yeah, but you're primed to receive it when it shows up.
You're ready. So when I don't have inspiration or I have a block, I do nothing.
I live. And it's absolutely because of the deeper inspiration that I'm blessed to feel.
I feel it's been cultivated.
I'm connected to it and I know it's real.
It doesn't have to greet me every day.
I know it's there. Like an old friend, not a lot of maintenance required.
Yes, it just requires you to be focused and be ready when it's there.
So let's say the muse makes an appearance.
You're receptive and you're not grasping, but your hands are ready to catch, right?
And then you go into execution mode on whatever it might be, or you start exploring.
I want to come back to something you mentioned, which was the performance anxiety and the mantras and various things you used to ground you.
What are the mantras that you have landed on?
Well, I haven't shared all.
I share some, two of them we share at the shows when we perform often.
One is one that I thought of for children and I thought of for the child within me.
And it's, I feel good.
I feel free. I feel fine just being me.
And you go over and over and over and over.
I feel good. I feel free.
I feel fine just being me.
Circular melody. I feel good today.
Oh, so good today. I feel good.
I feel free. I feel fine.
One, two, three, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.
So everybody sings along automatically.
I've seen it. I've seen it because I was in Moody theater in Austin.
Watching this just extend into the audience.
Yes. Amazing to watch.
Amazing to experience and participate in too.
I was so, man, that was such a great feeling seeing you there.
Just because I understand you get it on so many levels, you really understand.
It's such a spiritual practice.
It's not so much about me showing up and playing instruments.
Uh, you know, look at how great the band look at this dance, look at the more and more, more and more, and it always has been, but more and more, how do we continue to refine this spiritual practice?
This ritual of community, of sharing, of artistry?
All of it. And what are we pointed at?
What are we focused this life force energy at next?
So those mantras for me are, if you don't live it and it's not a part of you, it's not going to come out of the instrument.
What we play is life.
What we create is life.
The quality of the human being, the quality of the vessel, even a broken vessel, which is oftentimes the most effective, the most relatable, the most universal, but there has to be that space in you that you've saved.
That is the sacred space.
It doesn't have to be, of course, there are great ways to cultivate physical world, sacred places and practices.
So for me, those mantras and my prayers in that sense of understanding how to always know if that's there and if it's not there, it might be time to take six months a year, whatever I need to take off.
So that then I can know that is there right now.
I'm in a period where it's very strong.
So it allows for me to be fearless, which is something that I haven't felt that this strongly in a while.
Oh yeah. Got to ride the wave then.
You know what I mean?
Yeah. You got to paddle for the wave.
Yeah. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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Check it out. What other mantras can you share?
Oh man, this is deep.
You going in. I'm going in, I'm going in.
Scoop of gear intact.
Tim. Yeah. You know, because I believe in the power of mantras.
Oh, you. I do in meditation, in repetition, the ability to in a sense end up with the mind of no mind to cleanse the palate.
I mean, there's so many different ways you can use mantras also, which is why this is as deeply interesting to me.
It can be a concentration practice.
It can be sort of an erasing practice to regain some equilibrium.
There's so many different ways to use repetition.
Could be drumming too.
It doesn't have to be, could be instrumental.
There are so many different ways that you can enter unusual, uncommon states using repetition.
So I'm very, very interested in this, which is why I'm asking.
Yes, for sure. So two of the ones that I, not for stage, but just more for crisis that I go to is be still and know, which is from the Bible, be still and know that I'm God.
It is this idea that I'll give you a practice.
So be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am be still and know that I be still and know that be still and know be still, be just this idea.
I've sat with that and each phrase has a different meaning, even be still and then breath or room tone.
There's messages in that space, there's messages in the crevice.
So I've done that and sat in that and it's changed my entire perspective on a crisis or something that I felt perhaps I was wronged or perhaps, you know, there's so many opportunities for us in this life to transmutate darkness into light or even darkness into perspective.
Another one is I will be done, which is one of surrender.
Now, we believe there's a divine power.
There's however you name it, whatever your relationship to it is with, for the most part, had an experience.
There's something beyond explanation.
The universe is carrying us in some way.
That will be done is trusting that there's a divine logic to it.
All when there's nothing that you can do that will be done.
That will be done. That I will be done because the belief of this divine logic allows for you to understand that there's a path and you are accounted for in that path.
You are accounted for.
There's so much that is allowed for you to be at the culmination of so many things has led to you and there will never be another you.
You're the only one.
That specificity alone is something that comes to me when I'm in that that I will be done.
It's a revelation of so many other things, which is also allowing for the right thing to occur and for me to be accepting of it versus for me to control it without knowledge of what the true right thing is.
So there's so much that you have to cleanse yourself of from believing or from holding on to that's not actually connected to the best outcome.
But you can't always know that, especially in crisis.
It's very hard to know and so many parables are always like this.
This happened such good news, maybe, right?
Such and such happened.
This is terrible. Maybe it just depends on so many things outside of our sphere of knowledge that on so many levels can't be known.
When would you be inclined to say to yourself that last mantra?
When would you apply that in your life?
There's so many things that happen to us with our health.
I talk about to like a lot.
I love her as you know.
She's great. Had her on the show.
Yes. And I also borrow a lot of phrases from her, in particular this idea of being between two kingdoms, this idea of the kingdom of the well, the kingdom of the sick, and we all exist in this in between space.
And we have a passport for both, which is something that she created this understanding of that through the way she lives through it, where she gracefully moves through this time with such grace, with such power, such clarity.
I think about that.
I think about how there's a certain surrender that's required of all of us in times when we deal with health challenges, whether it's us or a loved one, and you find yourself in moments where there's literally nothing that you can do to take away pain or to take away the unknown and the anxiety of waiting.
So that's an opportunity for a great amount of growth.
That's an opportunity for a lesson to be instilled in a way that almost nothing else that I can think of affords you the chance for.
That will be done. That will be done.
Yeah. This, uh, coach I worked with for a while.
He used to say, this is your pop quiz from the universe.
When something unexpected would pop up.
You'd be like, all right, all that meditation you've been doing.
Let's see it. Let's see it.
Let's see, bro. Come on, bro.
You've been rehearsing.
This is game time. Let's see how it goes.
Yeah. Oh, Tim, you know what I'm saying.
When you do you in that moment.
Yeah. Yeah. I've had a lot of sympathy for watching you both go through that journey.
And I can only imagine what it's like.
I mean, I have been, of course, and most people listening have been in a position where they feel powerless to help, or they don't know how to help a loved one, but had a lot of sympathy for a challenging road and also really been in awe of how much growth both of you have exhibited through the challenges
and pain and so on.
In any case, I just wanted to say that.
Oh man, it means a lot to hear that.
And it feels so much, so much of the time as odd as it may sound.
It feels like a privilege to go through it together in the way that we have seen it.
It's shifted into almost the orientation of blessing.
And that's not to say that the difficulties are any easier, right?
It doesn't change the nature of hard things.
They're hard, but there's something about life.
There's a truth. There's something about going through the fire that is, it's so required and something about suffering that is so essential.
This idea that we're meant to run from pain or run from difficult things and find the most leisurely and completely frictionless existence possible is such a lie.
It's not just a lie because it's not possible, but if it were possible, that would kill you the most.
It would rob you in so many ways, which is of course, easy for me to say sitting in this comfortable chair right now, but in the midst of it, it's sometimes hard to see at the same time.
There was an astrophysicist, Jan 11, who was on the podcast some time ago, and I'm going to butcher this quote, but it's more the concept for me that has really stuck.
She said something along the lines of I used to look for the underlying path that would help me navigate around obstacles.
And then I realized there is no underlying path.
Like the obstacles are the path through which you discover yourself, through which you learn, through which you grow.
Like that is the path.
That's the path. Take those away and then you're just a free floating essence of comfort.
And that's just not the human experience.
And also you're talking about blessings.
So I could imagine, even an earlier version of me would say, like, oh, come on.
Now, I mean, I suppose that's helpful, but maybe it's delusional and it's overly optimistic, but it's deeper than that.
And I think that misses the mark because given a longer timeframe, given all the unknowns, it could be a blessing.
It could be a curse, but you can't know which it is over time and it depends a lot on your perspective, so you might as well choose a blessing.
That is the more enabling perspective.
And since you can't know it's coin flip, choose the side of the coin that is most enabling.
It seems to me, at least in the abstract, it's easy to say taxi runs over my foot.
We'll see how I do later today.
But it's that. And it's also you only will know when you are there.
You have to go there to know there.
You only know what it can be for you when you're in the fire.
Everybody can talk about what they would do when they are there.
Right? We can all say, man, if that would have happened to me, I would, you know, slay the dragon, uh, I would, you know, whatever you think you would do.
Most often is not what you would do.
And that's not because you're not who you think you are.
It's because there's so many other factors you can't know.
And for many things in my life that I think about the things I've learned the most from are when I've embraced the discomfort and realized what I was made up through it.
Let me just sit with that for a second.
Do you have, and then we're going to rewind the clock and I want to go back to very young John with a question or two, but do you have any favorite failures?
Now I put failures in quotation marks because this is something that at the time seemed crushing or seemed awful that actually in some way set the stage for much bigger or better things later.
Do you have any of those types of slips or rejections or failures that come to mind?
Wow. I feel like my life is riddled with them and I also feel like I've moved through them fairly quickly, not cavalier, but there's a sense of understanding it now that I didn't have then.
Yeah. How do you move through them quickly?
Why do you think that is?
It's because I know they're for my own good.
Not that they're all for my own good.
I guess the reason is because I don't actually believe that failure exists.
All right. It's not that it's necessarily for your own good, but failure doesn't exist.
There's opportunity for you to take something from the experience.
And even if the experience is reinforcing something that you already know, it's reinforcing something that you already know.
It's an opportunity for you to see this experience, this thing that you wanted, this thing that maybe you hope would work out, but didn't work out.
All of that adds to the fabric and the richness of your character and your experience and your knowledge base so that you, as I say, you go there to know there, you have been there.
I've traveled that road.
I've played those notes.
I know that piece. I sung that song.
I own that. And there's always on the other side of everything, the opportunity for transformation.
Can you tell a story of any, I'm not going to use the word failure, growth opportunities that you encountered before you turned into John Batiste and kind of marquee lights, right?
Cause you've really popped in a huge way since I first met you ages ago in probably Utah or wherever we happened to be.
It was, I can't remember initially where it was, but before that, can you tell the story of any incidents where things didn't go your way and how you metabolized it?
Man, I grew up in between Kenner, Louisiana, which is a very old school Southern town, old country railroad tracks running through the middle of it with canals, provincial Southern town, just outside of New Orleans and New Orleans is another planet.
And I grew up, you know, as a kid, getting bullied for all types of things, man.
When I was in school, I'd get bullied.
Whether it was, are you okay?
Are you with us? Are you slow?
You know, your feet, your nose, your hair, all these aspects of self -esteem that were attacked.
So then you go through life in these early years with no real understanding of what you have of value to offer the world, what you have to connect.
So fast forward, you get to a point where you discover music, but it's still something that, you know, amongst my family, I was the youngest.
And least talented.
When I was growing up, I didn't think that I would ever be a performer because there were 30 other people who had that covered.
It wasn't like wild to try to paint a picture of that in my mind.
People, that's a lot of performers.
Yeah. People don't get that they think, Oh, you were born with a tambourine in your hand and you came out singing.
This is not the case.
There was a glorious awkwardness that was a decade or more before I touched the instrument.
I started at 11 years old, late bloomer, in the context of everybody around me.
Now there was so many bad gigs, bad performances, and I was known as the kid who would play expressionless.
I would be playing and it would be all well and good, but my face would have no expression, none.
It would be like I was shut off.
So I get to the point where there's a long period of hours and hours in the practice room and performances between 14 and 17.
Where were you at the time?
Still in New Orleans, living in Kenin, going back and forth, New Orleans, performing at night, going to two schools at once.
Just this idea that you had the art school in that evening, then in the mornings you had an academic school.
Still getting bullied, still also becoming somewhat of a young musical phenom, but not the best one.
So there's like still not really like, uh, you don't really know where you fit, or where it's all going.
And was at that point, was piano the sort of key to that phenom perception?
It was the piano, that was the thing.
That was something that, you know, I'd alternate between playing and clubs at 14, 15 years old, that I wasn't supposed to be in at night after going to school, and then I would also on the weekends be doing classical piano lessons and piano competitions.
So alternate between those two realities, and also going and really finding this sort of tribe, my peers, starting bands with first my cousins, Travis and Jamal, who were older and multi -instrumental and inspired me.
Then Troy, Trombone Shorty, Andrews, who's maybe at the time we met 11 or 12, he'd been playing for a decade and touring the world.
So we start bands, we're doing club shows, we're doing all these things and constantly just presenting things that are experimental and pushing ourselves to do things that we've never done.
I didn't have a desire or a real push to go into music until I was maybe 17.
And I moved to New York on my own.
And the first story of failure...
May I pause you for one sec?
Okay, that's a cliffhanger.
So first story of failure.
Yes. What did the conversation look like when you're informing friends and family that you're going to move to New York?
Now what was the drive behind this?
How did that go? And then we're going to get back to the cliffhanger.
I felt like there was a great deal of support.
My mother is a visionary when it comes to understanding what someone could be.
She was the driving force of the piano being the instrument that I focus on at 11 versus, you know, several other things that were in the periphery.
I could have chosen the drums.
And just in brief, why did she think that was a clutch move?
I don't understand how she does it, but she does it.
Or she just saw... That's the thing.
You have a piano player inside of you.
Yes, yes. Even if she didn't see that fully, she saw that the piano is the right direction for you to take in music.
Is it because it's the option that opens up the most options or is there more to it?
I don't know if she had a vision.
She mentioned sometimes that there's a sophistication to the piano that she was attracted to that felt like it was the instrument for someone who is going to apply all of their forces and all of their abilities.
It's the conductors instrument.
It's the maestro's instrument.
So I know that that was a part of her thinking.
It's the thing that's going to allow for you to be as highbrow or as lowbrow as you want.
I think it was a smurf.
I mean, it seems maybe self -evident to say, but very prescient, incredibly powerful, deeply directing, because when I look at what you're capable of doing, part of the reason it seems to me that you're able to harness this broad spectrum of options is because you have that highbrow card to pull out.
And if people want to nitpick or they want to do this and this, you're like, all right, let me just sit down for a second.
And then they're like, okay, I take it back.
Which buys you permission to do a really wide range of things.
Yes, that is her thing.
She's very clairvoyant.
It's also a leadership quality she has.
She was an environmentalist before it was the invoke thing.
To do it for many years, you know, she, she were at a different time, not having been born in the South of black woman, like her would be a CEO of a company.
It's a different thing that she has.
That it's significant to think about now in retrospect, all the decisions that she made, which eventually led to me graduating high school a year early, moving to New York as a minor at 17.
And her supporting that, my dad also supporting that as a musical mentor.
My first musical mentor, he was the one who was like, okay, New York, what cats really play bro, you know, in New Orleans, we play and then there's like a legit thing with, you know, the cats in New York, they're a little stiff, but you'll learn a lot.
So he supported that too from a different angle, right?
So I went up there and he's like, you know, if you can make it in there, you have a lot to come back with the vision was never, Oh, you'll go there and stay there.
You did. I do. So you, you were saying your first failure.
So you get to New York.
What happens? It's a disaster, man.
Listen Molly's like, I'm listening.
You dig. I went to New York and within the first week I'm in the subway, traveling around and I pass out on the platform.
Pass out on the platform.
Yeah. As I'm out. I'm like, what's going on?
What's happening here?
This doesn't happen a lot.
I pay attention to this.
Molly sitting right next to you.
Hello, Molly. My external nervous system.
Hey, you pass out on the platform.
Yes. Yes. It sounds dangerous.
Yeah, very dangerous.
Luckily there was some friends there who could catch me and take me to, which at this time it was our things, Roosevelt, the ER, the one that's right next to Lincoln center, maybe near Fordham.
We went there. I'm there, they say, Oh, you're exhausted.
And maybe you having some migraines or something.
They give me Tylenol.
Tell me to go away.
I'm having night sweats.
I'm basically feeling this sharp pain in my lung.
And then I start to pass out again.
I feel this intensity.
Meanwhile, the second day that I was dead before all this happened, I'm in the dorms, Juilliard, I'm unpacking.
I'm doing all the thing.
The bunk is up. I fall off the bunk and basically fracture a rib, if not close to it.
They do the X -ray. They're like, you got a lot happening, but now this is the wildest part.
I go back to the ER.
They say you have walking pneumonia that you've had for two weeks.
You have to stay here overnight over a few days while you know, we give you the IV fluids and the antibiotics and all the things.
I miss the orientation of the school year.
I missed all the things that you kind of get acclimated to.
And there's nobody that is in New York.
I have a second cousin who lives in Harlem who I get acquainted with, and we become closer during this time.
But I remember thinking, am I supposed to be here from falling out the bunk?
And I'm like, no, I can't miss this.
So I go back. I'm just in there.
Next thing you know, I'm fainting in the subway.
Oh man, I'm just exhausted.
I got to cool out. Next thing you know, I'm in the nights of sweat and something's happening.
That's my lungs crying out.
You know, you've had pneumonia.
You've been walking around with this.
So between that being the first year of me being in New York, first time at Juilliard, first time being away from home, it completely felt like a crash and burn scenario.
It's time for you to get out of here.
All the signs point to the exit.
Everything's telling me at this time, internally, as I'm sitting in the hospital, I remember those days.
It was like three or four days I was there and I felt this sort of, as a kid, you're like, I don't want to tell my parents, but I also don't feel like I belong here, I need to get out of here.
And it's also this kind of, there was a dichotomy of coming from this very rich cultural heritage and this beautiful expression of excellence and pedagogy.
But Juilliard being this European classical legitimizing entity that especially as a young black kid, pushing the boundaries of what generationally my family has achieved, and also musically eventually wanting to, you know, become a disruptor from inside of all of it.
And just in the most benevolent way, rip it all down.
And build it again in a different way, knowing that that was somewhat of a motivation and then landing and sort of dead on arrival felt like it was ultimately the type of failure that it almost not only made me go home, but quit music, just kind of, it's like, this isn't my profession.
I can just go home.
I had a whole bunch of things I could have done other than this.
You know, to sit in there by yourself thinking about, is this a message?
So what happened? You're here.
What resurrected the confidence or the direction?
Just the inner knowing man.
You got to just know.
All right. Hold on.
Hold on. I don't have a, I believe you, I believe you and I underscore it.
And you're a sensitive guy.
When I say sensitive, I mean like your instrumentation is sensitive.
You're like a jewelry scale, not some like scale at the sports club in New York, that's five pounds off.
You're down to like the nanogram.
So you have sensitive instrumentation.
You think to yourself, man, I really thought A, B and C here I am.
I've had this 12 car pile up of disasters.
Maybe I should just go home.
What did the little whisper say that started to tilt it back in the other direction towards that inner knowing, what was the feeling?
That's one question.
If you want to take it a different angle, I would say, let's say there's a kid 10 years from now, basically you very similar.
Kenner, Louisiana, at Juilliard sends you a letter.
All these things have happened.
Different set of disasters.
But he's like, I really don't know if this is for me.
I could go back and do A, B and C.
So very similar situation.
And he's like, maybe he hasn't earned a knowing, but you don't know.
What do you say to that kid would be another way you can take it whichever direction makes sense.
So youngster, take your time to find the prize.
There's no rush. Pace yourself.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger is what they say.
But until you experience it, that's the only way the texture that, that added to me immediately in retrospect is why I continue the inner knowing that these experiences, which are just, you know, a series of unfortunate things at an unfortunate time can be exacerbated in your mind and in your psyche,
especially if you stew in it.
So I think, and I would tell this to the youngster, that happening to you is the gift of your arrival because it allows for you to figure out upon entry how to process all of the discomfort that's to come in different forms in different ways.
So pace yourself, take your time.
It's your time. It doesn't all have to happen right now.
And as I'm listening to describe the gift of these unfortunate events, because it's preparing you for the discomfort to come.
It makes me think of psychological and spiritual calluses.
Oh, now you can do some real heavy lifting.
Yeah. Now you get, that's right.
So the sensitivities I want to double click on again just for a second, because personally, and I've seen this in friends, busy, busy, busy, go, go, go a hundred miles an hour, trying to do everything all at once.
And that hasn't been me forever, but there have been periods of time when I'm like that.
And when I'm in that gear, I wouldn't say that if someone were to ask me, do you feel a deep sense of inner knowing about where you're going to be a year or two from now where you want to be?
I'd say no. However, if I slowed down a bit, if I decluttered my mind a bit, not necessarily watching paint dry, but I create the space, whether it's through meditating, whether it's through exercise of a certain type, like I just did archery before I came here, which clears my mind really well.
Then the volume of the competing voices in my head has been lowered enough that I can hear things, right?
And I'm wondering if you have ways to do that for yourself or if the signal is just so strong you don't need to do that.
But I mean, you have a lot of projects and commitments and I'm sure you have a million opportunities presented to you.
When things get noisy, how do you help yourself to hear the inner feelings and voice and so on, so that it doesn't get drowned out?
Oh man, Tim, we have to own what's been entrusted to us to own.
We really have so much that is divinely bestowed upon us.
And you wake up every day as a steward of it all.
And then you get up and you have a choice.
Do I pick up my phone?
Do I give my mainframe away to some other thoughts or ideas or visions or distraction, if you want to even call it that.
It's a choice, whatever.
I don't really, how did I set that intention prior to laying down the rest?
What am I feeding into my psyche?
What am I watching?
The eye gate? What am I listening to?
That's why I make music a certain way.
Cause I know that for some, that's going to be a fueling prerequisite for them.
It's going to be their fertile ground.
Yeah. Something powerful is going to emerge from that.
So for me, it's like owning a car, or you have this, you have this thing.
It's on lease and to me, that's it.
I don't try to hear, as I was saying before, it's like a dream.
If it comes, I don't rely on that to be the thing.
And I have ways like for you, archery connects, you are, primes, you to be connected.
I've strayed away from the desire to have this mystical encounter at every turn in order to prove the existence of, be still and know.
This is for funny how that's come.
When you evoke these mantras, I'm telling you, man, but that's not a real thing.
That's not a real need for me to own what I've been given now to own what I've been given also when it comes to how to be primed to hear and to receive the download.
It's found in the mundane things.
And also the basic things.
Do you drink enough water?
Do you get enough sleep?
Do you feel your heart would love when you can?
Do you feel your mind with good things?
Not even just things that are of good report.
Of course it's great, but also information that will empower you with what you have.
For me, I've studied music as an empowering force for what I have.
I've studied many things, music being chief among them.
That's going to ignite me based on what I've been given.
What ignites you? How do you surround yourself with all of that?
And then, okay, we have a sense of that to some degree.
We have a lot of experts in that to some level.
The flip is, how do you cultivate giving it all the way, all the time?
How do you give it?
The measure of your greatness is the measure of your generosity.
How do you give it?
Now this is sharing the thing that you have on lease, this thing you've been endowed with.
That's hard. Because you can cultivate portals of giving.
You can donate, you can give your time, which is the highest level of giving in terms of intentionally giving of your time is the highest level that you can go.
But can you give of your time and your resources and your energy in a way that's not regulated by a portal or something that you set up in advance?
Can you live in a posture of giving?
Can you create a generous temple within?
And can you walk through the world and live in a space where you're unfettered and unbothered by the need, but also you've preserved, you've maintained the vessel so that you don't completely rid yourself of your life force energy.
You don't want to be drained.
There's many things that can drain you and pull from you and there's darkness in the world.
So then the discernment comes with this sort of awareness and there's spaces in time when I'm much, much more aligned with that.
And it's so clear and so many moments of the deepest, most lasting impact and inspiration have happened when I'm in that space, but it's maintenance.
It comes back to like, it's so simple.
It's so simple and we feel good when we do that because that's how the machine was made.
We have joy when we do that.
We feel purpose when we do that.
It's like the machine was made a certain way.
You take care of the machine that you have is going to function a certain way.
Yeah, you got to do the maintenance.
It may not be sexy, but the machine needs maintenance.
That thing needs...
Come on, get it together.
Come on, doctor. Just a few more questions.
I'm having too much fun.
I mean, go for six more hours.
But if you could put something, metaphorically speaking, on a billboard, right?
So this isn't an advertisement.
It's to get a message, feeling, quote, anything out to the world.
Just pretend that hundreds of millions of people would see it, billions, who knows?
Could be anything. What might you put on that billboard?
I don't know if I would take that opportunity.
Tell me why. I don't feel called to do that.
And I also don't feel like we're in a time where anything without context can be received purely.
Tell me more about that.
This is a thread that I think I'm also pulling on in my own way.
So I want to hear more about what you mean by that.
Everything is received now based upon the context that we have defined within different cultures and all of our culture of humanity and the stereotypes and the practices, the socio -cultural practices, and all of the ways we relate to each other and exist.
We have decided to go in the direction of believing that I can look at you or I can hear something, a snippet of you, fragment.
A fragment of Tim is all I need to understand.
And whereas there's a proliferation of data and we're more connected now than we've ever been, but we're not, we're more susceptible to deception as well.
And we would rather express and connect in those ways in lieu of going deeper and a dis because it allows for that.
But all these other forms that we have propped up as primary separate us from depth.
Yeah, it's the surface level that doesn't lead to the deeper levels.
It prevents us from getting to the deeper levels in a sense.
So you don't want to traffic in that anymore, in any way.
The reason I started this podcast 10 plus years ago now was to be able to get into the deep water, to have the space for that and to hopefully at the time I didn't know, but attract a listenership who also felt a thirst for the subtleties that you can only touch upon and the holistic edges of a person or a topic
that you can only get access to when you have the space, when you have time.
So I resonate a lot with that.
Sometimes things take multiple listens, multiple exposure.
If you feel something from something, that's your first signal, the emotional connection, something even if you don't understand why or something relates to something you experienced or something that you heard, you want, you aspire to, has been revealed as clues or tips or some vision, right?
That's how you know that there's many, many, many more layers there for you.
Yeah, totally. I was just thinking, as you're saying that of this book that I've read so many times called Awareness by Anthony DeMello, I think the subtitle is The Promises and Perils of Reality.
In any case, really fun book, very short, and I've read it on Kindle, but I've also read it in paperback over and over again.
And what strikes me is each time I read it, because I have one copy with highlights over time, I highlight different things whenever I go back, because I am a different person in a different situation or a developing person in different circumstances with different feelings about things.
And it's just remarkable how each pass reads like a new book almost.
This is the thing that I've been thinking about for years, this idea that as people, whether creative or not, but it applies to the creative.
Obviously, we only have two, maybe three ideas in life.
We have two ideas that we are constantly refining, recreating, presenting, refining, recreating, presenting, and it's your life's idea set.
Then, if that's the case, how much, and I ask you this because I want to know if you made a list of the five books or the five things or five places, because I love your list.
This inspired me. What are the five things that you know you could possess in this lifetime if you had to wipe everything else away and the only knowledge and the only inspiration, only experience, the only everything that you could draw from were of this five, because I'm reaching a point where that's
almost something that I'm willing to live by.
Instead of the pursuit of more knowledge, more understanding, more broad vision and connectivity, how do I go as deep as I can within a handful of things that are for me and leave the rest, which is a radical ...
For you, if you were to play that game, what are the five things?
Maybe you should have podcast.
Maybe that's your next thing.
I will give it a shot.
Then I want to ask you the same thing because what's a cool twist on the question is it's not just books, documentaries, people, but experiences or beliefs that could be in the list.
Then it gets really interesting.
Yes. Then it gets super interesting because you can't outsource it.
No. Now you have to own it.
For me, I was thinking as you were talking, and this is rough draft.
Yeah. Of course. I totally get it.
It's rough. It's changing every other day.
A lot of red ink at some point, but what comes to mind for me was number one, everything's going to be okay.
I think from a very young age, I've just been hypervigilant.
I had a lot of bad things happen to me as a kid.
So my system has always been oriented towards things that are not okay, and they're not going to be okay.
So you have to be constantly scanning your environment, scanning people for threats, et cetera.
So number one would just be everything's going to be okay.
Number two would be it's all about relationships.
The relationships are what matter.
Friends, family, that's it.
That's it. And also your relationship with yourself, but honestly, I feel like I best develop myself in relationship.
So I pay attention to the question of do I like the version of myself that I am when I'm with this person?
So the relationships being everything.
Number three, this one, we could dig into it if we want, but I would say death isn't the end.
So don't be afraid of it.
That might require some explanation, but I would say don't spend your whole life afraid of death.
That'd be number three.
That one, it got a lot of meat on the bone.
Yeah, there's a lot of meat on the bone there.
And I would say, honestly, those are the top three that immediately come to mind.
What I might say is for me personally, don't be afraid of your sensitivity.
It can be hard, but it's a gift.
The instrumentation, like my sight, my hearing, it's all very, very, very sensitive.
So being in a place like New York City can be completely overwhelming.
Being at a dinner party with eight people can be really overwhelming.
So interestingly, so I very rarely go to concerts, but when I attended your event, it resonated differently because it wasn't unidirectional.
It was not the sage on the stage or the performer on the stage inflicting sound on the audience.
It was a collective experiment and there was a lot of emergent participation and interaction, which changed how my senses metabolized the whole thing, which is very interesting.
So I didn't feel any overwhelm at all at that event, but on a pure decibel level, it wasn't overwhelming, but you're in a concert, right?
And it's a cozy venue.
You feel it. So I would probably talk to myself about the sensitivity because I've viewed it as a liability for a long time, but I think there are different ways to frame it.
That's what comes to mind for me.
What about for you?
Man, wow. You mind?
I could play my answer.
Yeah. Let's do that.
Because it's in abstract form, but rapidly approaching clarity.
Let's do it. Yeah, absolutely.
100%. Where are we going to do that?
Over here? If, I mean, is that okay?
Yeah, we got the lav mics on.
We can just wander over.
Oh, we don't need. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's give it a shot.
I'm excited about this.
So see. I do these concerts.
I call them streams.
It's like stream of consciousness, completely improvised, spontaneous composition, right?
I'll sit at the piano and without any sheet music or any preparation, I will play 90 minutes, two hours.
And it really invites the audience to feel this wave.
It's akin to a collective chant.
And we're in spaces that we're discovering together.
So when I was saying I wanted to answer, but at the piano I was going to stream for a minute.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that.
Thank you, Tim. That's beautiful, man.
Beautiful to be with you.
Yeah. Likewise. I like your answer.
Yeah. So what does that feel like to you to do that?
What is the felt sense?
Feels like you are traveling, you're moving, and your hand is telling you, this is what I want to play.
And as you play it, you're seeing all of the colors and you're hearing the sound that it starts to tell you, now I want to go here.
And then sometimes it's telling you things that you don't know.
You're not familiar, but it's going to anyway.
And that's the biggest difference because it's telling you something you haven't practiced.
You don't know if you can actually play.
You don't know if you actually will make it.
Why do you think it takes you there?
It's the truest expression.
The moment calls for what it calls for.
And you can't really dictate what the moment calls for based on your preparation.
Yeah. Or your preference.
Your preference is, because it's your preference is probably not true.
Yeah. That makes sense to me.
So it truly is music that is channeled to you for everyone in that moment never to happen again.
I love that. Thank you so much.
Wow. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
You know? So glad we did this.
This is amazing, man, to have the piano here like this.
That's beautiful. I didn't know you were going to have this.
I never had you done that.
I haven't heard that before with the piano.
The only time we ever had a piano, like a guest appearance, very different was 2000.
Let me get this right.
15. Long time ago I interviewed Jamie Fox at his house.
He galloped the piano for a second.
It was very short, but totally different context.
Totally different context.
Because there's the instrument.
Then there's the vessel.
Then there's the communication between the two.
And that's the one and only time that piano and my recollection has made an appearance in 750 episodes.
So this is a first.
Man, that's amazing.
Yeah, that's incredible.
So I have to ask you because number one, I'm excited about it.
We can do it here. I don't need to sit down, but Beethoven Blues.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The blues. I am excited about this.
Yeah, it's going to be amazing.
Especially after our conversation, even more so.
Wow. And after spending a little more time hanging out, it's been a minute.
Because now I'm thinking about the music as something that I can ingest.
Something that I can let feed me.
Yes. Inspire in the sense of breathing in.
That's right. So can you say a bit more about how that came to be?
You know, the idea is something that I feel uniquely positioned to do is hearing Beethoven's music and not just playing it as it says on the score, but being in conversation with Beethoven and extending his music.
So as we talked about, you know, the idea of streams, this sort of spontaneous composition.
If you were to take Beethoven's music and exist within the music, as if you were co -composing it with him and adding all these elements that many of which, all of which existed after his time on earth.
So you have things like flamenco music or gospel music, soul music, jazz music.
And blues, primarily, which to me is the not just musical innovation of the 20th century, but an innovation of human expression and spirituality.
Could you say a little bit more about that?
Because I listen to blues.
Yes. But I want to understand why you feel that way about it.
Blues. And it's not that I disagree, but I want to understand the magnitude of what you're saying.
Yes. Yes. Blues is a form of music.
It's also a form. It's a 12 -ball form.
It's a sound. It's a style.
It's an inflection.
You can sound like the blues without playing the blues.
If you moan or you cry, the instrument wells.
That idea is something that is about our existence in the human condition.
And the blues is an allegory for the human condition and sound.
It's a musical allegory that exists within the context of a cultural movement.
So that's something that has not happened and has existed before it had a name.
So for you to find things like that in the world that are foundational to our existence, and then to figure out how do I name them and identify them so then they can be shared, and then furthermore, how do you create a whole system that not only becomes its own form of musical engagement, social cultural
engagement, there are dances, there are blues rituals, juke joints, stomps, boogie woogie, all this that we've grown accustomed to.
Now I can also implement that into other spaces of music which becomes this democratic expression of humanity.
So what I started to think about with the blues is there are forms of music that express that aspect of the human condition and that pathos, but didn't have all of the language that we have to acutely express it and also include the range of cultural diasporic reality that has existed since.
So now we can take that and inject these other forms of music, these other expressions with something that's so profound and so deep and so rooted, so human.
It's an opportunity, it's an opportunity of a lifetime for an artist and the blues provides that.
Now the one other thing in the technical realm, the blues is simple and is complex.
The blues is generally three chords, but you don't always have to be playing those three chords to be playing the blues.
It's spiritual but it's also very much scientific.
So if you take these five notes, that's the pentatonic scale, that's the sound of the blues.
The pentatonic scale though in this form has existed in music since the beginning, Gregorian chants, indigenous folk music, music of drum circles in West Africa, in Ghana, all the different sounds of Appalachia.
Eastern music, you've heard this sound.
You hear this sound in every culture since the beginning.
Now if you add if you add that note, that's what we call the blues scale.
The blues is in the sound of the pentatonic scale.
That in and of itself has a perfect symmetry.
The blue note is the expression that our early ancestors in this country created to add the sense of the American experience to this scale.
It's more than scale, they added this to exemplify the specificity of America and the experience of American life.
In all different ways, you can play the blues even without playing the scale because the thing about the blues inflection is that if you can capture that blues inflection, you can find melodies that have the blues.
You can find voices that have the blues.
You can find rhythms that have the blues, mainly the shuffle rhythm, which is something that came from Africa and is the marriage of six, eight over two, a two beat and a three beat combined at the same time, and that evolved into the American shuffle rhythm.
So all of these things are so interconnected and so sophisticated, so intricate.
And the blues, after all that, you can sit on a porch or a bar room or a juke joint and anybody can sing it.
And it's always two verses and an answer.
The thrill is gone.
The thrill is gone away.
The thrill is gone.
The thrill is gone away.
Finish it for me. Oh, wait, I'm sorry.
No, no, no, I'm just saying.
Yeah, yeah. That's how simple EIIs.
It was codified. Yeah, the architecture, the basic undergirding eye beams of the architecture are quite simple, but the way that it can be applied is just beyond counting, right?
It's the thing that existed in the air and the thing that we've all felt within, and it took this American experiment for it to emerge into a form.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, it's a combination of like discovering fire, this thing that has always been there, that we now have a form for.
And it's also something very elemental that can be wielded in a million different ways.
And as you have different cultural influences, you have different combinations of people, newer and newer and newer ways of applying it emerge.
We've heard it in rock and roll baselines our whole life, the old...
Oh, you know, just thinking about all of the ways that I've heard the blues before even really understanding that is so ubiquitous.
You know what I mean?
I'm thinking we're here in Jimmy Hendry's studio.
That's the pentatonic scale.
There's just so much that you can listen to so much and understand it.
So when I took Beethoven, I was thinking...
You know, if you put that on it...
Beethoven in the Congo.
One, two, three. One, two.
One, two, three. Hey, who you tell?
So you know what I mean?
I do. And then you find the blues and stuff.
My dad used to play that song on the piano when I was a kid.
That specific segment just activated like Ratatouille style.
And Anton Ego flashes back to being a kid.
That was wild. It's incredible what music does.
I mean, I'm not a musician, but it's so igniting to use that word.
It's just an incredible key that unlocks.
These songs too are so deeply connected to us.
Beethoven wrote songs we're listening to.
These compositions, these melodies, themes, all these things we've heard for years and years over generations.
So it ignites people's love, not just for music, but brings them back to moments in their life.
Experiences in their life.
And that's what this album, this music is generally about the concept of Beethoven blues, but also about the humanity that it will bring people together, bring somebody back to the instrument who stepped away for many years.
A kid who a grown up who, maybe I don't see myself in classical music, but now I see, oh, there's a, I see something that was always there.
Like the blues can bring it out.
But it just hadn't been presented to me in that way.
And I mean, what comes to mind as an image for me also is you have these various tributaries of music that have in some ways separated out.
I'm not sure I'm using the right geological term here is, but they've sort of separated and flowed out in different fingers.
And what you seem to have done starting, maybe not starting, but certainly at Juilliard, especially afterwards, you've sort of brought these flows back together in a way that they can intermingle, which gives people permission to remix, to make something that is uniquely theirs.
To live, baby. To live.
That's it. That's it.
It's not just the music.
It's not about the music.
It's about the music and more.
He played it. I like doing these harmonies.
Imagine if you, there's a version on the album that goes for 20 minutes and it makes this into a, it's this healing trance.
It's like a meditation.
I'm just going to put this album on repeat and listen to it a thousand times.
I mean, 20 minutes of that, I mean, that feels like taking the hypotenuse to catharsis.
Yes. That's it. That's the idea.
I feel very privileged to even watch you do that.
Brother, thank you.
I'm grateful for you building this space and allowing for folks to come in and share who they are and what they have to offer, and then it becoming this feedback loop of us all growing, of us all learning and growing together.
That's you, man. Thank you for that.
That's powerful stuff.
Thank you. I love doing it.
How did this end up being a job?
Crazy. It's a blessing of life, right?
Jon Vatice, JonVatice .com.
Beethoven blues. Go get it, everybody.
Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
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