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Jonathan Batiste’s Underground Music
| Posted on September 30, 2011 |
New Orleans has long been a piano town. And it’s long been a parade town. Therein lies the problem: If you’re a pianist, you can’t join the parade. No one’s yet found a way to strap a Steinway around his or her neck and march down St. Charles Avenue.
This dilemma has often perplexed Jonathan Batiste, the gifted New Orleans pianist now living in New York. The 24-year-old Kenner native is very tall and very thin—almost a living stick man—and he has long, lean fingers to match. Those fingers were made for the piano, for they can reach across an octave and a half with such ease and agility that Batiste can form voicings that other pianists can only imagine.
When he played Jazz Fest this past May, he wore white slacks, a white shirt and a bright red blazer as he sat down at the Steinway grand on the Congo Square stage. When he played “New Orleans Blues,” his composite of several Jelly Roll Morton tunes, he got two different rhythms going at once—a push-and-pull Caribbean rhythm in his left hand and a rippling European rhythm in his right. At times he lifted his hands off the keys and started slapping the second-line groove on the dark wood of the piano itself.