SOUNDTRACK: JON BATISTE-Tiny Desk Concert #972 (May 4, 2020).
This Tiny Desk Concert was originally (sort of) posted on January 6, 2020 with this disclaimer
Jon Batiste’s Tiny Desk Concert was published prematurely. The new publication date is March 2020.
I don’t know if there was actually a video posted on Jan 6, but I’m curious if people got to see an unfinished version.
Regardless, here it is May (not March) and the Jon Batiste Concert is up. I now know Jon Batiste as the band leader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but I knew of him before that from an NPR recording with Stay Human back in 2014.
Batiste is a multi-talented musician, playing keys, and guitars. He’s also a charming front man. But he really lets his backing band shine here.
The New Orleans musician came to the Tiny Desk not with his late-night house band, but with an all-new cast. His all-female collaborators — Endea Owens on acoustic bass, Negah Santos on percussion, Sarah Thawer on drums, and Celisse Henderson on guitar and vocals — were an inspiration.
Batiste took us through some of the many sides of his rich musical history,
The soulful ballad titled “Cry” which features Batiste playing the Wurlitzer organ. This is probably my favorite song of the set–I love the sound he gets. He is a really impressive keyboard player, handling the cool Wurlitzer solo with ease. The surprise for me came when Celisse Henderson played a great soulful guitar solo. I just assumed he’d be doing all of the soloing, but everyone in the band had a moment to shine.
Before the song ended properly, Endea Owens started the next song with a great upright bass riff for the start of the jazz and hip-hop inspired “Coltrane.” Batiste does an opening rap before the song slows down for the chorus where batiste jumps to the piano and the backing band sings along.
As is often the case when musicians perform in Washington (and especially blocks from the Capitol) the banter hinted at the political. Jon Batiste stopped to tell the NPR crowd, “we’re playing some music, and we’re coping. The times are in an interesting place, but music is always that universal language that can bring people in a room together.”
Then he says, “it’s the first time we’re ever playing these songs, and it’s the first time we’re playing together.”
Then Batitste picks up a square guitar to start the rocking Motown-inspired tune “Tell The Truth,” which he says is self explanatory. Even though Batiste is on the guitar, Henderson gets the ripping solo again. The middle of the song has a drum solo from Sarah Thawer but the real star is Negah Santos on percussion as her bongos really stand out. Then Batiste takes out the melodica (like he uses on Colbert) and gets a terrific sound for a quick solo.
He ends the show with a bit of church. He says “When times get weird we forget about the simple things, so I like to write a basic song to remind us of that. That song is “I Need You.” It opens with an amazing piano solo. Batiste so casually plays all up and down the keys, it’s really impressive. As is the solo he plays mid song.
[READ: May 1, 2020] “Padua, 1966”
Despite the title the story is actually set around Newark in contemporary times. The 1966 part comes in a story told later.
I really enjoyed the way this story seemed to self-correct.
Miranda was tall and as dark-haired as they come. I say was and not is and that is inaccurate because she is still around and I really am not.
Miranda was married to Luke, A WASP. They had a daughter named Caroline, “a name I’ve never understood.”
How’s this for a line:
They fell out of love because they never were in love.
Before it got bad between them, Miranda would come over and talk to the narrator, whom she called Zia. They would go to the city and (since they were both Italian an had the same tastes) they would eat eel, anchovies and struffoli.
Even though they were friends, the narrator sums up her friend:
Miranda was a whore. I don’t know how else to say it. The way she spoke to men, to all men. It was obscene.
She told Zia that she hated her husband and had no feelings for their daughter–when the child cried, nothing tugged at her heart.
But also, Zia was unsurprised to learn, there was another man in the story.
A black man, she said, her voice a growl. She knew I would be stunned and she loved that I was. She said how much it turned her on to be had by a black man.
The man was a crack dealer–he had a cot for a bed and a shared bathroom. Soon enough she moved out of her house and moved in with the man. Her husband got full custody of Caroline.
After a time, she left the drug dealer when he hit her with a ringed hand. She lost a tooth. She went to see Luke but he refused to let her in. He would not let her see their daughter. So she went to see Sol.
Sol was seventy-five. He was a doctor and very fat (old doctors were permitted to be fat).
She looked sickly but still had her breasts and her thick hair was still dark black. He invited her in. She brought struffoli and cried about her daughter. She felt like her heart and lungs were being torn out.
Sol told her about the woman he met in Padua, 1966. He fell for her. But she had a child and he could never bring a woman home to his mother (a strict Catholic) if she had a child from another man. The woman went home with him. What she did with the baby is quite surprising.
Sol says he can help her. He can provide for her. He slid her hand toward his crotch.
The stunning thing about this story (aside form all the surprises already) is the way it ends and how Zia’s elliptical comment about herself at the beginning resolves.
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