Jon Batiste on the Fragile Intersection of Life and Art as it Plays Out in ‘American Symphony’ on Netflix

The multi-talented (to put it mildly) musician Jon Batiste didn’t intend for his documentary American Symphony to turn into an often grueling expression of love and art while dealing with the acute health issues of his partner Suleika Jaouad, but as John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” Batiste, while reaching a new peak as a musician outside of his regular gig at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and scoring 11 Grammy nominations for his album ‘We Are,’ was on the cusp of creating his greatest artistic statement, a symphony yo be performed at Carnegie Hall, when Suleika’s decade-long dormant leukemia returned.

Already mid-film, Batiste, Jaoud, and the Oscar-nominated documentarian Matthew Heineman had a difficult decision to make. Did they continue to work on a film while Batiste was attempting to be both caregiver and creator, or did they step away from the project entirely? The trio made the bold choice to move forward and show the beauty and the pain of life. In doing so, they have brought forth a film that is so much more than a “musical documentary,” they have made a statement on film that is equally as grand as the symphony Batiste created that was the original vision of the film. Let me tell you, that’s saying something. The film and the score for American Symphony are both profound and deeply felt.

Below, Batiste and I discuss those hard choices and these extraordinary twin works that came from them. 

Awards Daily: I saw American Symphony in Charlottesville at the Virginia Film Festival and I thought I knew what I was getting into because I thought I’ve seen a lot of musical documentaries. But that’s not really what this is. Did this film out with more conventional intentions?

Jon Batiste: The thing that we started out with was already a bit of a callback to earlier films that I’ve seen that are process-oriented films where you follow something as it’s developing, and you’re very much in this verite format. That was going to be what we did to track the symphony creation. I had to build a new symphony and imagine what it would be to play this piece, which is a re-imagining of what symphonic music can be. That was a journey where I had to select musicians one by one, all from different cultures and backgrounds. As you see in the film, you have some musicians who are playing modular synthesizers, some classical, some jazz, some archaic folk instrumentation, and finding a way to communicate. That was the film idea, but Matt always says that his mentor told him that if you end with the film that you started with, you weren’t listening along the way. 

And as life had it, a month into us deciding to start filming, within the same week we got the news of the eleven Grammy nominations across seven categories, we also got the news of Suleika’s leukemia returning. Not wanting to stop the filming was a conversation. Suleika didn’t even really want to be a part of the film, and then this news came. I was very protective, and there’s so much that also changed for me, and it just became an ongoing discussion. As Matt says, it’s one of the most collaborative films that he’s ever made where we’re reassessing our decision to film every week and processing all the stuff that’s happening in real time. My original idea was to bring Matt in to capture it because he doesn’t do music docs. He’s in war zones and he has this ability to get access and he’s very unflinching. What he’s doing is being a very truthful filmmaker and artful as well. I thought applying that to a symphonic process of an artist in a very pivotal time would be an amazing vision, and not like typical music documentaries. So, that’s pretty much where we landed. It was like we got that in spades and it ended up not really being a music documentary.

Awards Daily: You show yourself in a very different light here. Especially to those who know you mostly from The Late Show.

Jon Batiste: Suleika has been really influential in my life. Her work is much about her journey, the first time that she had this life interruption happen to her and she continues to write about not only her journey, but many people who are moving through those gray areas, those in-between places of life: not necessarily sick, not necessarily well, or they’re free, but they’re not completely acclimated back into society. She’s written a lot about folks who were in the penitentiary, in the system of our justice and all these different ways of expressing vulnerability. As a person who was a celebrity and on the public stage, oftentimes it comes at a premium. You have to keep the mystique and you have to keep the persona, the image, and the brand. People only see the highlights. From the perspective of illness, I really felt that it was important and is important for us in the public eye to show that we’re not exempt from the human condition. It’s not just about showing who I am, it’s about showing that we all deal with this. This loneliness epidemic is something that we all deal with.

Awards Daily: You’re a pretty talented guy, but I got the feeling you still married up.

Jon Batiste: Yeah, you have to. That’s the game, right? (Laughs).

Awards Daily: I have been listening relentlessly to “It Never Went Away” this morning. There’s two things that in particular have caught me about this new song that closes the film. One is that there are so many heavy moments in the film and so much complexity of you trying to complete this journey in the symphony and two, you are at the same time dealing with this incredible health difficulty that Suleika is going through and you chose, in the best way possible, to keep the song that closes the film very simple and to the point.

Jon Batiste: That was something that happened with a last minute edit before our premiere day. Matt changed the final scene of the film and, as he did throughout the process, he would sometimes share a cut of the film or share a scene from the film, particularly when it relates to the score of the film as well. There’s symphonic music and my diegetic score throughout. So, you have these moments where I’m seeing things and I have an idea of what he’s doing and we get to a point where I have a sense of what the film is before the premiere. He sent me this massively impactful and really cataclysmic change to the last scene of the movie that did not work for me. My wife and I both felt like it didn’t work. Matt and I started speaking about it. 

Obviously it’s his film, but we’ve been very honest and blunt about what we thought about the whole process and what our fears and concerns were. That’s how we built trust. It was a conversation that led to really believing in the scene but knowing that it needed to end with something more. It needed a song to emerge from the score to help complete the movie. And that song is me singing directly to her. It’s conversational and simple in that way, which I think gives you a sense of, not even closure, but it culminates what this period was, and then it moves into the future, and the future is still unknown. That was what we wanted it to do. It’s very hard to blend symphonic music with songs, and to make it feel seamless in the film context. So, I had to go back to some lullabies that I composed for Suleika when she was in the hospital, and build the song from one of the themes of those lullabies. That was really how we kept it honest.

Awards Daily: The line that gets me is “I need you, and that’s never goin’ to change.” It’s deceptively simple, but sung from the point of view of a person who is trying to be a caretaker to someone who is very ill and be there as their husband and partner in life, and you’re saying I need you even though you’re sick. I thought that was such an incredible sentiment.

Jon Batiste: That’s exactly what you start to realize, and all of us will go through it at some point if we haven’t already. When you’re sick, you can often be treated like the patient, not the person. The purpose of That song is to dispel any notion or thought of unworthiness or feeling lesser.

Awards Daily: I found the symphony itself to be stunningly avant garde. The intro, and the part where you’re composing it with pounding on the arm of a couch, and then you hear that later play out. But then, as you’re performing at Carnegie Hall, you lose power, and have to do what all jazz men do, which is improvise, right? The loss of power must’ve felt like, “I guess this is just my life right now.”

Jon Batiste: It felt so much in keeping with the whole period of time. The whole thing has been like a form of a spiritual attack. It felt as if it was an invisible realm that was in battle. Our forces to transcend and move through and to keep a forward motion with upward trajectory, and something is trying to keep us down and to stop this from happening and to stop us from moving forward. All that is encapsulated in this key moment of the piece where I’m playing the electronic sample pad to set up the next movement of the piece, and that’s when the power goes out. How can you even write that? So, 

I just improvised a piano piece to bridge the symphony movement from one to the other until the power would come back on, which I didn’t know if it even would. It was so strange because the power went out, the mics for up to two hundred instruments were gone, the sampling pad and the modular synthesizers. No one would be able to hear anything if it wasn’t for the acoustic piano and the live mic that’s on the camera. No one would have heard that piece, because even the recording technology went out, but no one in the audience knew anything went out because it was only on stage. The house lights were on and everything, so people who were there that night and have seen the film since had no idea, and were just shocked even more so to realize that.

Awards Daily: You really went huge with recording, with the production of the symphony and this historical vibe that you wanted to create where it mixed in all of America. The closing piece with the Native American chants is so fragile and powerful at the same time that it feels like, at any second, it’s going to crash under its own weight and it never does. How the hell did you pull that off? It was amazing to hear.

Jon Batiste: Wow. Thank you so much. I will say it wasn’t easy. And there are other parts. Eventually we’ll put out this piece in its entirety. I really do want that to happen. You get to hear that score in the film and as a performance in the film, and that’s great, but you don’t get to hear the entirety of the piece in sequence. There’s moments in the composition where we had to invent new forms of music notation. You have musicians who are playing together, some who read music, others who don’t, some who have never played in a concert hall, electronic instruments that are triggered by samples and programming, and then you have archaic folk instruments and everything in between. We had to invent something new in order for those kinds of moments to happen.

Awards Daily: I can only imagine how proud you are of this film, and I hope Suleika continues to do well. I just have to tell you, it was one of the most profound experiences of my cinematic life to be there in Virginia. From the film to the Q&A to your performance, I’m never going to forget it.

Jon Batiste: That means a lot, and I know that it’s the beginning of the journey. I hope to see you down the road.