For Jon Batiste and Louis Cato, can new albums seize the fun of the stage? : NPR

Jon Batiste performs on the Newport Folks pageant on August 5, 2023. Batiste, a riveting stay performer who has led the band at The Late Present and gained an album of the 12 months Grammy, simply launched a studio album, World Music Radio, that seems like an try and consolidate his billowing expertise right into a secure unit, like squeezing a genie again into the bottle.

Vincent Alban/The Boston Globe/by way of Getty Photos

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Vincent Alban/The Boston Globe/by way of Getty Photos

Jon Batiste performs on the Newport Folks pageant on August 5, 2023. Batiste, a riveting stay performer who has led the band at The Late Present and gained an album of the 12 months Grammy, simply launched a studio album, World Music Radio, that seems like an try and consolidate his billowing expertise right into a secure unit, like squeezing a genie again into the bottle.

Vincent Alban/The Boston Globe/by way of Getty Photos

Across the midpoint of Jon Batiste‘s triumphal headlining set on the Newport Jazz Pageant earlier this month — simply after a runaway gospel rave-up on his tune “I Want You” — the person referred to as in reinforcements. “My brother, Louis Cato!” Batiste yelped from the piano bench, indicating the slim, hooded determine who’d simply hopped onstage with a mic in hand, like a scat-singing ninja murderer. The musical hookup between them was free and breezy, approaching jubilation as Batiste steered his massive band into a canopy of Ray Charles’ “(Night time Time Is) The Proper Time,” full with rafters-raising name and response.

Batiste, lanky and loud in a fire-engine-red go well with, and Cato, catlike in all black, shared this collegial Newport second the way in which they’ve shared a uncommon distinction — as the one two full-time bandleaders on The Late Present with Stephen Colbert. (Cato, a necessary member of the present’s home band, took over after Batiste left the put up final summer time.) It takes a particular type of musician to keep up the on a regular basis balancing act of flexibility, hospitality, magnetism and self-discipline required of that position. And as riveting stay performers — on any stage, not simply the one on the Ed Sullivan Theater — Batiste and Cato make it appear pure, if not precisely straightforward.

Each artists launched new studio albums within the final couple of weeks: Cato’s second solo effort, Reflections, dropped on Aug. 11, and Batiste’s newest, World Music Radio, arrived final Friday. Every album has been rigorously wrought, with flashes of inspiration and a excessive degree of craft. Every can be a reminder of what will get misplaced when a musical dynamo tries to consolidate their billowing expertise in a secure unit, like a genie squeezing again right into a lamp. In numerous methods, these two albums present what can occur when the solicitous pursuit of an viewers — and on some degree, a enjoying area — drives an artist to misjudge the task, together with their very own strengths.

Batiste’s is the larger manufacturing by far, and the one shouldering the heaviest expectations. World Music Radio marks his first full-length launch since WE ARE, which upset a area of nominees that included Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and H.E.R. to win album of the 12 months on the 2022 Grammy Awards. What registered then as a genuinely kaleidoscopic musical worldview — a pure extension of Batiste’s unruly, ecstatic avenue view — has now succumbed to a grander, blander imaginative and prescient of pop utopianism.

There is a idea at play on World Music Radio. Because the title suggests, it envisions Batiste because the disc jockey of an all-night international broadcast, full with call-in request line. Dial that quantity, which naturally begins with 504, the world code of Batiste’s native New Orleans, and you may hear the album’s opening observe: a staticky aircheck of his sign-on as an intergalactic DJ named Billy Bob Bo Bob. This framing gadget provides Batiste a technique to break the fourth wall, talking on to his listener. “Love ya even when I do not know ya,” he mutters in “Goodbye, Billy Bob,” making an unconditional vow really feel like a motor reflex.

Batiste is not the primary jazz-trained musician of his technology to look to the radio dial for a metaphor as he courts a mainstream viewers. Simply over a decade in the past, pianist Robert Glasper made some extent of calling his R&B and hip-hop crossover mission Black Radio — the primary in a collection of albums that established a cultural footprint past their Grammy awards. That very same 12 months, 2012, bassist and singer esperanza spalding launched an album that she titled Radio Music Society, telling NPR on the time that “The good thing about the radio is, one thing past your realm of data can shock you, can enter your realm of data.”

What’s puzzling is why Batiste, who has years of expertise in a broadcast medium, would go for such a homogenizing type of pop expression along with his conceptual radio present. World Music Radio seems like a worldwide bazaar co-opted by company possession: its visitor record contains artists just like the Nigerian singer Fireboy DML and the Catalan vocalist and trombonist Rita Payés, however the extra emblematic collaboration is a model partnership with Coca-Cola, which launched a single from the album, “Be Who You Are (Actual Magic),” as a part of its Coke Studio™ international music platform. The tune — a dancehall mashup involving the Ok-pop woman group NewJeans, Atlanta rapper JID, British singer-songwriter Cat Burns and Colombian singer Camilo — strikes a sentimental chord very similar to the previous “Purchase the World a Coke” advert marketing campaign.

Batiste’s lyrics, which default towards all-purpose uplift, do not assist him transcend this generic air. Even “Butterfly,” his most touching ballad, basks within the sense reminiscence of Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird.” His collaboration with Lil Wayne needs to be an earthy triumph — within the method of his latest visitor flip with one other New Orleans rap icon, Juvenile, on the Tiny Desk — however “Uneasy” deploys them over a beat evoking manufacturing unit settings, with a fumbling guitar solo for good measure. (“Life Lesson,” a collaboration with Lana Del Rey, has extra of an emotional heart, however comes tacked on to the tip of the album; it is each a standout and an afterthought.)

All through World Music Radio, Batiste’s core message of inclusivity slips all too simply right into a conformist key. “We’re born the identical,” he sings in “Worship,” over a churchly hum of synthesizers. “Return to that place.” As a lyric on an album, that decision towards sameness rings hole, ignoring the actual distinctions that make each listener a person. Batiste’s magical energy as a performer, alternatively, is imparting a pure sense of belonging. He did this with “Worship” on the Newport Jazz Pageant, stretching its wordless house-music chorus — “La da da-da, da-da, da-da” — right into a delirious prolonged sing-along. The fantastic thing about the massed viewers in that second wasn’t its homogeneity, however moderately its blissful unity of function.

Whereas Batiste got here to Newport as a returning hero — a headliner throughout each Folks and Jazz occasions, simply as he’d been in 2015 — Cato was making his debut. In a rousing afternoon set, he was backed by a number of the musical aces who, up till the Writers Guild of America strike, have been his common companions on The Late Present. (Profiting from the expertise on the bottom on the pageant, he additionally featured a distinguished visitor, Hammond B-3 organist Larry Goldings.) As a singer, Cato favors the graceful, robust supply of an acoustic soul artist; he can recommend a millennial Donny Hathaway or an extension of early Maxwell. He is an especially gifted guitarist — on a tune referred to as “Good Sufficient,” his solo constructed towards the identical unabashed elation that has been a calling card for John Mayer — and his intuition as a bandleader is unerring.

Cato can be a songwriter, in a modest however tactile vogue: The songs in his Newport set, most of which seem on Reflections, struck an unforced center floor between introspection and exhortation, totally familiar with our trendy lexicon of remedy. “I used to be too scared to face my very own fears,” he sang on the title observe, over an Isley Brothers groove, “and I may see them in her.” His plainspoken emotional readability made it solely pure to hear him singing “Jealous Man,” in an association that evoked Hathaway’s traditional therapy of the John Lennon tune.

On the album, Cato performs each instrument, overdubbing himself right into a one-man Wrecking Crew. (He does the identical factor, to in style impact, in his #CatoCovers Instagram collection.) That self-containment serves the songs and his versatility, but additionally imparts a cloistered feeling. The perfect moments in his Newport efficiency have been all a few mutual alternate of energies, and the way in which he marshaled them. He is such a galvanic and beneficiant presence onstage which you can see why he is discovered success as a bandleader on The Late Present. Nevertheless it’s a clumsy reality that his Newport set reached its plain apex with the finale — a thrillingly exuberant cowl of “Transfer On Up,” the Curtis Mayfield anthem. Cato might want to discover methods of reaching comparable heights along with his personal music, if he has any probability of leveling up himself.

For Batiste, the open query is whether or not superstar and pop-cultural forex can nourish moderately than stifle his artistic idiosyncrasies — all of the euphoric, uncontainable, irresistible energies that tumbled out into the group at Newport. The too-muchness of World Music Radio is of one other kind; as a musical product it is each overwrought and underfed. On the shut of “Be Who You Are,” Batiste sings “We are able to solely be who we’re.” The phrase, with its incidental echo of WE ARE, comes throughout as an affirmation, but it surely’s additionally an ordinary to be met.