Long before Jon Batiste was a bandleader, television personality and Grammy- and Academy Award-winning artist, he was a classical piano student.
As an adolescent in Metairie, La., he spent Saturday mornings at the home of his teacher, known as Miss Shirley, working on scales and arpeggios, and music by Bach and Debussy.
“I was the kind of student that would leave the books in the foyer to sit there until next week’s lesson,” Batiste said. “No practice at home. The beauty of the music didn’t dawn on me until later.”
Now Batiste, 38, is returning to his classical roots with an album called “Beethoven Blues.” It features his improvisations on masterpieces like “Für Elise” and the Fifth Symphony, as well as Beethoven-inspired compositions like “Dusklight Movement” and “Life of Ludwig.”
For Batiste, who recorded the album in a day and a half at his home in Brooklyn, the project is personal. It brings him back to the Maple Leaf Bar and other stages in New Orleans, where, as a teenager, he began fusing Chopin nocturnes and Bach inventions with his own music.
“This is my way of life,” he said. “Living with the music and exploring it and being in conversation with the music and the composers.”
On a recent evening at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, Batiste laughed as he improvised on classical favorites at the piano, including Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. Then he turned to Beethoven, injecting bits of gospel and the blues into the “Moonlight” Sonata.
“This one’s heavy, man,” he said.
In an interview, Batiste discussed his early days as a pianist, the African rhythms in Beethoven and elitism in classical music. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You grew up in a family known for New Orleans jazz. How did you begin to experiment with classical music?
At 11, I started piano and began doing things outside the family. And by the time I was 14, I had my own band. We would be in practice rooms, or in nightclubs or places we were too young to be in. We would present our own music, and sometimes I’d be coming from a piano recital or a lesson or a competition, and I would play some of that music onstage.
What pieces do you associate with your early days as a piano student?
When I was at Juilliard, I studied with William Daghlian. We a spent a year on Brahms’s Ballade No. 1 — not because of the notes, but because of the nuances. There’s so much that’s not in the score. The score is the coordinates of the music. But you have to go there to know there, and to really go there, you have to be stripped bare as a performer. From these seemingly simple compositions, we found a way to bring out the soul — the science and the soul.
Were there any models for you as you began to mix classical music with other genres?
At the turn of the 20th century, the European classical tradition combined with the traditions of Black America and of first-generation immigrants to form a new American cultural identity. The fusing of all that is very inspiring to me. There was a beautiful sharing and a reverence for quality and skill, but also a depth of originality.
Why make a classical album now?
In classical music, there’s a reverence that is equally stifling, and it limits us from being in conversation with it and the opportunities of creative transformation that lie therein. Why do we hide from it? Why do we separate ourselves from something so beautiful? I love the idea of creating something that is for everybody.
In your view, where does that stifling tendency come from?
Classical music has allowed for things to be written down, but it’s also allowed for people to hold onto the score in lieu of the mystery of the music. If we had the great composers come in today — post-blues, jazz, hip-hop, gospel, soul and R&B — I think they would incorporate those forms into their music. And the music would unfold as variations on a theme, rather than a concrete score that never changes for the rest of time.
Tell me about your relationship with Beethoven.
His music is so very African, filled with polyrhythms, in two-meter and three-meter at once all the time. The feeling of the blues is in his music, before the blues became a term or a form or a sound. There’s an underlying human condition at the foundation of who we all are. And the greatest artists reach and grab hold of that and express that, before we even sometimes have a name for it.
How did you choose the pieces for this album?
I wanted to capture the imagination of people who might not see themselves as musicians any longer. Every person who gets drunk at a party plays a version of “Für Elise.” The notes might be all wrong. But it’s beautiful because it is a communal expression of music. It invites people not just to listen, but to participate — to be in conversation with Beethoven’s music, just as we’re in conversation with other works in the public domain, like “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
One track is called “5th Symphony in Congo Square,” a tribute to the site in New Orleans where Black American music blossomed.
I thought about the feeling of Congo Square at the time of celebration when our ancestors and the rest of the culture merged in a very cataclysmic time in American history. And I set that to the implied rhythms of the Fifth Symphony.
You recently said that some genres are seen as “pristine and preserved and European,” while others are considered “Black and sweaty and improvisational.” What did you mean?
Sometimes, we revere music because it’s great, but also because it’s European. And some things we are reluctant to revere because of the communities that it comes from and the places that it is meant to be played: if it was formed in a bar versus a court, or if it’s from the houses of ill repute versus a church. I’m not really trying to buck a tradition or a system. I just think that there’s actual value and creative transformational power when we pursue purity of expression versus rules and regulations.
You have spoken about the importance of reviving the tradition of spontaneous composition, which is widespread in jazz, in classical music.
Spontaneous composition is trusting that you have refined your artistic voice and identity to be worthy of being in conversation with the greats. It’s the trust that you have something relevant — and, dare I say, needed — to add to these foundational melodies and themes.
In recording this album, did you make up each rendition on the spot?
I thought about it a lot in advance. It takes a lot of prep and a lot of understanding and calibrating your equilibrium toward melody, rhythm, sound and harmony, in order to arrange or forecast a composition before sitting at the instrument.
The album includes some original compositions inspired by Beethoven’s life and music. What was your aim there?
I have a vision in my mind of a story, and then the story tells my hands what to play. “Life of Ludwig” is the story of Beethoven’s life in sound in under two minutes. It segues into “Für Elise-Reverie,” which is a daydream on “Für Elise,” a 15-minute version of the piece. “Dusklight Movement” is a counterpoint to the “Moonlight” Sonata, taking some of the minor churning in the first movement, which evokes the blues. Maybe you hear a bit of “The Thrill Is Gone” by B.B. King.
You have said that this album shows a more vulnerable and intimate side of you.
In a world where there are so many “isms,” so many covers and so many masks, there is beauty in vulnerability.
What would Beethoven make of your album?
He would be like: “This is fire. I love this.” That’s the beauty of what we do when we create. It doesn’t matter what he thinks. Because once we’re gone, what we leave is our legacy — who we are and what we did to contribute to the greater good of humanity. And he did a lot. Now it’s our turn. It’s up to us to decide what we think about what we’re doing.
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