Though he’s been playing in a band since age 8, Jon Batiste sounds more like a philosopher than a musician.

Batiste and his ensemble Stay Human make their West Coast debut Thursday in Olympia, the start of a tour supporting the band’s first album, “Social Music,” due out Oct. 15.

While his music is typically classified as jazz — which makes sense, given that he’s associate artistic director of The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, N.Y. — Batiste doesn’t hear things that way.

To him, it’s not genre, but purpose that’s important, and he calls the music he makes “social music” (hence the album title).

“More than a genre, the concept of Stay Human and social music is a philosophy,” Batiste said last week in a phone interview. “Everything is connected. The Internet has brought us to the point where we’re truly becoming a global community in a literal sense. We want people to remember the power of human exchange and the power of us all being together in the world and how that can be represented in a musical experience.