BIG MONEY Jon Batiste

• 1 LEAN ON MY LOVE 04:11
• 2 BIG MONEY 02:34
• 3 LONELY AVENUE 03:41
• 4 PETRICHOR 02:38
• 5 DO IT ALL AGAIN 03:26
• 6 PINNACLE 04:20
• 7 AT ALL 03:17
• 8 MAYBE 05:05
• 9 ANGELS 03:12
• Total Runtime 32:24

Info for BIG MONEY

BIG MONEY, the ninth studio album by the singer, multi-instrumentalist, and Juilliard-educated composer Jon Batiste, is a response to this question. Throughout his career, Batiste has skirted easy categorization, blurring genres and styles. His GRAMMY® Award–winning album We Are (2021) fused R&B, jazz, hip-hop, soul, blues and classical music, drawing from influences ranging from Little Richard and James Brown to the Jackson 5 and Kendrick Lamar. Last year’s Beethoven Blues was a blues-infected reimagining of Beethoven compositions. Meanwhile, 2023’s World Music Radio, an ambitious concept album featuring an intergalactic disc jockey named Billy Bob Bo Bob (Batiste), drew from Afrobeat, reggae, K-pop, trap, and more to create a melting-pot vision of what global music could sound like, still rooted in Batiste’s musical foundations of jazz, R&B, and soul.

After a career spent rewriting the rulebook, Jon Batiste rips out a few more pages with BIG MONEY, his most immediate and visceral record yet. Following the chart-topping success of Beethoven Blues, which reimagined classical music through a soulful, inclusive lens, Batiste pivots again. This time digging into the dirt of Americana with a groove-heavy, genre-blurring manifesto about capitalism, connection, and collective joy.

Written and tracked mostly live over just two weeks, BIG MONEY is messy in the best way: loose, raw, and pulsing with humanity. Co-produced with Dion “No ID” Wilson, it’s an album that prizes spontaneity over precision, capturing the kind of unfiltered energy that’s increasingly rare in pop music. And that’s exactly the point.

At the center is the title track, a rallying cry disguised as a revival anthem. Inspired by a post-show epiphany at the Ryman, it finds Batiste strapped to a guitar and backed by retro-soul wizard Nick Waterhouse and the powerhouse harmonies of the Womack Sisters, granddaughters of Sam Cooke. What starts as a swaggering groove blooms into a meditation on ambition and identity. “Mama says, ‘Don’t be a dummy, everybody chasing that big money’” — a lyric that cuts like a proverb and dances like a hook.

“This is the circus of love,” Batiste says. “You don’t lose your soul — you gain it.” That tension, between striving and surviving, between joy and resistance, anchors the entire record. Whether channeling blues, gospel, reggae, or stripped-down balladry, BIG MONEY folds it all into what Batiste calls “New Americana,” a sound rooted in tradition but speaking to right now.

Guests like Andra Day and Randy Newman add their voices, but the real stars are the songs themselves, each track feeling like it was caught mid-flight rather than sculpted in post. There’s a warmth, a humanness, that mirrors the message: in a world chasing polish and profit, maybe it’s the unvarnished moments that matter most.

Earlier this year, Batiste brought that same soul-stirring presence to the Super Bowl with his powerful rendition of the National Anthem. He also added two more Grammy wins to his shelf, including Best Music Film for American Symphony and Best Song Written for Visual Media for “It Never Went Away.”

"BIG MONEY is an accomplishment and a welcome addition to the discourse surrounding inclusion in American roots music. Despite being a relatively short record, there are more influences and ideas than there is space to unpack here. Even if the album doesn’t fully realize the communal promise of its mission, BIG MONEY is an important step in the evolution of Americana. It reminds us that the roots of American music are deeper and more diverse than many of us have been taught to believe." (Caleb Freeman, cannopy.ca)

Jon Batiste

Jon Batiste
“I think we each need to identify what the thing is that we were born to do,” says Jon Batiste. “Everybody has something they are born with and are representing—but a lot of times we run from that, from what comes most naturally. But once you find that, then you can learn and add different flavors and spices, and really grow with what you are and who you are.”

The title of HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS comes from a 1983 painting by the great African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the reference is significant. “Basquiat is an example of someone drawing from all his influences,” Batiste says, “who benefited from the sacrifices of those who came before him, but displayed that we have so much more to do—even though we’ve come a long way. It’s a critique of things we have had to go through, but that have allowed people like me and him the opportunities to do the things we’ve been able to do.

With HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS, Batiste dives deep into his own personal and cultural heritage, weaving an intimate and emotional tapestry out of original material and American standards that carries the listener from the early jazz of New Orleans to the present day. Guiding the acclaimed singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and leader of the group Stay Human—since 2015 the house band of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—was legendary producer T Bone Burnett, whose numerous accolades include Album of the Year Grammys for the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack and Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

“The goal was just to collaborate on something that felt authentic to both of us,” says Batiste. “What we came up with was an intimate, stripped-down portrait of who I am, and the lineage of musicians and performers who are really vital to my work and to his. On this record, I want us to bop, dance, laugh and cry to the sound of the music while we remember our black heroes and wield the superpowers they left us with. Because of them, I don't have to wear a mask. I get to be who I am.”

The pair met at a birthday party for Bono in Los Angeles. The guests—Pharrell, Herbie Hancock, Beck—all sat at a long table and everybody performed a song as a gift to the U2 singer. After playing his offering with Stay Human, Batiste started talking to Burnett, and recognized their kindred musical spirits. Batiste joined a session that Burnett was producing for folk singer Rhiannon Giddens, and they started making plans for a more extensive project.

A year later, as Batiste was getting ready to take over his role on the Late Show, they went into Esplanade Studios in New Orleans. “It’s an old church converted into a studio, with amazing acoustics,” says Batiste. “The sound has a special quality, almost like you’re sitting under the piano. It was a joy to capture that sound, and then it was off to the races.”

They got forty tracks down in two days—initially, songs by many of Batiste’s heroes: Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, and early New Orleans composers like Jelly Roll Morton. “A lot of those didn’t make the final cut,” he says, “but it let us tap into that tradition of people who were both high artists and entertainers.”

Born in Kenner, Louisiana (check the opening instrumental, “Kenner Boogie”) Batiste is a member of one of the biggest and most important musical families of the New Orleans area. He started playing drums with the Batiste Brothers Band at age 8, before switching to piano a few years later. HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS, his sixth album (in addition to multiple EPs), represented an opportunity to explore his own history.

“The styles are a lot of things I grew up hearing, studying, trying to internalize,” he says. “And being the bandleader of a late-night show, that fraternity is important, too—musicians who have studied their craft and found a way to translate that into a unique personality.”

Burnett helped steer the ship as Batiste cut each song in one or two takes. “T Bone set a certain ethos in the recording process that seeps into the record,” says Batiste. “It’s not a tangible thing you can measure, but a way to explore the artistry. He allowed me to be who I am and capture it sonically in a way that was most representative of that.” (He notes that Burnett even gave him a story by Zora Neale Hurston about the African-American folk hero High John the Conqueror to help “evoke the lineage we were trying to draw from.”)

After the 2015 sessions, they reconnected for another day in 2017 and then two more in May of 2018, keeping a focus on Batiste alone at the piano. “The idea was to strip everything down, go back to basics,” he says. “When you strip something down to rawest form, the essence of it shines through.” He believes that this is why, though the album was recorded over such a long time, it still feels unified and not dated; “You’re getting who I am at the core.”

The classic songs on HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS include the New Orleans standard “Saint James Infirmary,” “Smile,” “The Very Thought of You,” and Louis Armstrong’s iconic “What a Wonderful World,” which is slowed down to a soothing crawl; Batiste asks the audience to close their eyes when he plays the song onstage. “I took something Pops was known for and restated it, made it into a meditation about where the world is today,” he says. “The drone I play in my left hand helps get you focused.”

Batiste doesn’t feel intimidated by taking on such hallowed material. “I do understand why someone might feel that way,” he says, “but I just feel so authentically part of that history, I can approach it without apprehension. I feel it more as a calling—maybe not a responsibility, but a privilege to have insight into that lineage and represent it properly.”This is just the beginning.

I hope to write the next chapter of black American Music alongside my generation.

Quickly, though, Batiste started to write more songs of his of own. He points to “Is It Over” and “Don’t Stop” as examples of the fusion of influences to which he aspired. “They feel original, but drawing from those root elements—folk, gospel, jazz, blues, even classical music—and transforming them into something new. ‘Mr. Buddy’ is another one, a really vulnerable performance that mixes the different elements in one of the most unique ways on the record, and also works as a song.”

Three years after the initial New Orleans sessions, Batiste (with the help of arranger Harvey Goldberg) determined that he wanted to add some overdubs to a few of the tracks. “A record really is different from a live performance, “ he says, “so I wanted to create an atmosphere around some of the records to enhance the emotions.”

“It’s a great statement right now,” he continues. “With so much division in the world, we can remember the contributions of great artists as a way to help unify us.”

This album contains no booklet.