#775: Jon Batiste — The Quest for Originality, How to Get Unstuck, His Favorite Mantras, and Strategies for Living a Creative Life

0:00:01 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:00:05 This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show.
0:00:07 This isn’t just any episode.
0:00:11 This one turned out really, really special.
0:00:17 And I really encourage everybody to listen to this once as audio only
0:00:21 if you are listening to this without any video.
0:00:27 But also go to youtube.com/timferriss to ours two S’s to see the video.
0:00:33 We recorded this episode in the recording studio designed by Jimi Hendrix,
0:00:40 where he slept the acoustics, the surroundings, everything is gorgeous.
0:00:42 And my guest was in the flow.
0:00:45 We happened to mesh really well together.
0:00:49 And it’s one of those episodes that I will remember for many years.
0:00:52 My guest, John Batiste, is a five time Grammy Award winning
0:00:56 and Academy Award winning singer, songwriter and composer.
0:01:01 I met him ages and ages ago back when he was a mere incredible,
0:01:04 incredible musician, composer, et cetera.
0:01:08 But I’ve been able to watch him become the marquee lights, John Batiste.
0:01:10 And it has been a thrill to watch.
0:01:11 We talk about it all.
0:01:16 His eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues, is set for a November 15th release.
0:01:21 When we are sitting in Jimi Hendrix’s studio, there are pianos, guitars,
0:01:24 you name it, and we don’t just talk.
0:01:28 We walk around and he uses music to answer some of my questions.
0:01:29 It’s phenomenal.
0:01:34 Beethoven Blues marks the first installment in his solo piano series,
0:01:39 showcasing Batiste’s interpretation of Beethoven’s iconic works reimagined.
0:01:40 And that is an understatement.
0:01:45 You’re going to hear a lot of it in this episode towards the last 25 percent.
0:01:47 So buckle up and stick around.
0:01:51 Beethoven Blues follows Batiste’s studio album, World Music Radio,
0:01:55 which received five Grammy nominations, including album of the year.
0:01:59 As a composer, he scored Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night Now in theaters.
0:02:03 The film depicts the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live’s
0:02:08 very first broadcast in 1975, underscored by Batiste’s blending
0:02:10 of jazz, classical and contemporary elements.
0:02:15 He composed and produced the music live on set, capturing the intensity
0:02:17 of the show’s debut.
0:02:20 He also appears in the film as Billy Preston, the show’s first musical
0:02:23 guest, and certainly he has lived that out himself.
0:02:27 Additionally, Batiste composed and performed music for the Disney Pixar
0:02:31 film Soul, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score
0:02:34 alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
0:02:36 You can find him at JohnBatiste.com.
0:02:43 That’s J-O-N-B-A-T-I-S-T-E dot com on Instagram and socials @JohnBatiste.
0:02:46 And boy, oh, boy, I love this.
0:02:49 I really think you guys are in for a treat.
0:02:49 Stick around.
0:02:51 Listen to the whole thing.
0:02:55 Watch it a second time on video at youtube.com/TimFerris.
0:02:59 So we’re going to get to the good stuff, but first, just a few words
0:03:01 from those who make this podcast possible.
0:03:05 The following quote is from one of the most legendary
0:03:09 entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley, and here it goes.
0:03:13 This team executes at a level you rarely see even among the best
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0:06:28 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:06:30 Can I answer your personal question?
0:06:32 No, I would have seen it in a perfect time.
0:06:37 I’m a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
0:06:51 The snow monkeys in Japan figured it out, so we’ve been doing it a long time.
0:06:53 They just hang out in the hot springs.
0:06:58 Did you ever go to a place in Japan, Okinawa?
0:07:02 I’ve spent time there because I lived in Japan when I was younger.
0:07:04 So I’ve been to Okinawa.
0:07:07 I have, yeah, culturally, super different from the rest of Japan.
0:07:07 It’s cool.
0:07:09 I can’t wait to go.
0:07:10 I wanted to ask you if you had been.
0:07:17 I’d never been, but I’ve always wanted to just go there and like spend a long period of time, like months.
0:07:18 Yeah.
0:07:19 I feel like it could change you.
0:07:25 I think it could in part because I asked everybody down there
0:07:28 because the Okinawans have so many hundred plus.
0:07:31 Yeah, senior citizens, they live a long time, or at least they used to.
0:07:34 And I asked every person I met, what’s the secret?
0:07:37 And they all had a different answer, which was pretty adorable.
0:07:41 But the one constant was they were all active.
0:07:43 I had a driver who was helping us out.
0:07:44 He considered himself young.
0:07:49 He was 85 and we would drive and he’d point to the retirement homes and he’d say,
0:07:51 that’s where you go to die.
0:07:52 That’s when you stop.
0:07:55 He’s like, as soon as you sit on the couch and start watching TV, it’s over.
0:08:00 And we would go to the farmer’s markets and you’d see people were at 98, 103,
0:08:05 walking around shopping, tending garden, active, they’re still engaged.
0:08:14 That’s absolutely incredible because all of those things you think of are mundane
0:08:17 and that you are trying to get away from doing.
0:08:18 Exactly.
0:08:20 That’s what I’m trying to retire from.
0:08:21 Yeah.
0:08:26 Or I want to outsource that, which that almost becomes a way of life.
0:08:27 It’s like a philosophy.
0:08:28 Yeah, totally.
0:08:33 I remember I was reading different books by Kurt Vonnegut.
0:08:34 He was one of my favorite writers.
0:08:35 Oh yeah, Kurt did.
0:08:37 He had this, I think it was an essay.
0:08:42 He was like, if people tell you the purpose of life is not to fart around, don’t believe them.
0:08:44 He’s like, I go to the post office.
0:08:45 I wait in line.
0:08:46 Most people don’t want to do that.
0:08:50 He’s like, but that’s the connective tissue, all those in between moments.
0:08:55 And if you’re only celebrating the huge this, the huge that, the big events, I mean, you’re
0:08:57 missing like 98% of your life.
0:08:58 Oh man.
0:08:59 Wow.
0:09:04 There’s something about that I think about often.
0:09:10 How do you maintain a flow state in waking life throughout the mundane?
0:09:17 How do you embrace the mundane and find the muse in the mundane without having to go to
0:09:18 some sacred place?
0:09:19 Yeah, exactly.
0:09:21 You have to take a time out.
0:09:28 Like I have to go and plug into something else to connect versus just being connected.
0:09:33 The muse in the mundane, how do you, how have you found that?
0:09:36 Or how have you tried to find that?
0:09:37 Mistakes.
0:09:38 All right.
0:09:39 Mistakes are amazing.
0:09:40 Mistakes are brilliant.
0:09:47 It’s a gift to go about your day and for something, either a mistake or something that you didn’t
0:09:57 plan an interruption, some seeming calamity happening that allows for you to not only
0:10:01 respond but to create.
0:10:05 And then in that moment, you have the ability to discover something that’s much greater
0:10:11 than anything that you could invent or devise because there’s something that happens with
0:10:19 the synapses and the way that you respond to seeming calamity that brings you to your
0:10:22 highest potential.
0:10:26 So I have to ask you about something I read when I was doing research for this, which is
0:10:31 always fun because I get to be like a creepy stalker online for people I know.
0:10:35 Which otherwise would be very strange and uncomfortable for everybody.
0:10:40 And I was reading this piece from The Guardian and I want to ask about introspection because
0:10:43 you’re very reflective and I admire that.
0:10:49 I mean, you seem to have cultivated self-awareness and a lot of what you do.
0:10:53 In this Guardian piece, they said maybe that’s because he didn’t speak until he was 10 or
0:10:55 something along those lines.
0:11:00 Did you not speak for a lot of your, I guess, childhood given the framing that they put
0:11:01 in the article?
0:11:07 Man, you know what’s amazing is those years, I don’t have so many memories of those years
0:11:08 either.
0:11:09 And I don’t understand why.
0:11:15 I’ve just started to excavate that more and more in the last year, just trying to figure
0:11:20 out what was going on, what was the context.
0:11:25 And for all intents and purposes, my life has truly been blessed.
0:11:29 I’ve had such a great upbringing.
0:11:37 But there was something about being born into the world that felt like I needed to observe
0:11:38 before I participated.
0:11:46 It felt like I needed to watch what was happening and synthesize what was happening.
0:11:50 All the different perspectives, all the different personalities growing around a lot of colorful
0:11:57 personalities, a lot of sounds and rhythms, a lot of life, life force energy and a lot
0:11:58 of danger.
0:12:07 So I think the aspect of being in all of that, meeting my natural state, my innate makeup,
0:12:16 it was deep in introspection, something that I still have yet to put words to a fully understand
0:12:24 in my early years, put me in a space where I was observing and gathering, observing and
0:12:32 gathering, observing and gathering, and then eventually it became okay, let me emerge into
0:12:34 a new era.
0:12:38 Let me try to mold some things, and it started with music.
0:12:40 Let me try to mold the world around me.
0:12:45 Let me try to shift things and create things and influence things, dare I say.
0:12:52 Let me try in little ways I would start, and then it extended far beyond music.
0:12:54 What age would you say that was?
0:12:55 Hard to pin down.
0:12:57 Yeah, exactly.
0:12:59 You already peeped it out, Tim.
0:13:04 It’s like it’s around 14 or 15.
0:13:10 It was music that allowed for me to have a opportunity to present myself.
0:13:18 On stage you have to present yourself in a way that is amplifying aspects of what’s inside.
0:13:24 And ultimately, you have a decision to make as a performer to decide how far between who
0:13:32 you actually are and who you’ve created to project on the stage are you.
0:13:35 How big is the jump, the discrepancy between those two?
0:13:37 It’s a choice you make.
0:13:41 How do you think about it, because I remember chatting with Andrew Zimmer and TV host does
0:13:42 a lot of different things.
0:13:46 And he said be very careful about, and I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like be very careful
0:13:49 about who you are in episode one, season one.
0:13:52 Because you could paint yourself into a corner where you have to be that guy now forever
0:13:53 if it’s popular.
0:13:56 How have you thought about that?
0:14:01 I thought about it from first the perspective of how do I get to a point where all that’s
0:14:08 within me, all these things that I feel, these ideas that I have, this vision becomes a reality.
0:14:14 So that took so much stepping outside of my comfort zone, we call it throw yourself in
0:14:15 the water.
0:14:21 We do things like when I was in college, my band and I would go in the subway and we would
0:14:22 play for people.
0:14:23 We wouldn’t ask for money.
0:14:24 We wouldn’t bust.
0:14:30 We would just play concerts for people who weren’t expecting a concert to just get to
0:14:37 the point where we were fearless about presenting art and also wanted to change the atmosphere
0:14:42 in this community of a train station that has all these people from different walks
0:14:45 of life now locked in the train together.
0:14:51 So it’s a certain aspect of winning them over that we worked on.
0:14:54 How do we create harmony in this scenario?
0:14:59 And then that extended, now let’s go and strike up conversation with people that we don’t
0:15:04 know and talk to them about things that they’re going through.
0:15:08 And then let’s share some things that we don’t want to share that we’re going through.
0:15:09 I have a big question for you.
0:15:12 I think it’s really to all of this and I’ve wanted to ask you a lot and Molly’s getting
0:15:14 excited and stretching over here.
0:15:16 So I think it’s a good sign.
0:15:24 So the question is about how to choose where you go on this quest of originality.
0:15:30 It seems like that was part of your life pretty early, maybe 15, 16, 17.
0:15:35 The phrase that keeps coming back is “quests for originality.”
0:15:36 And of course, we’re all original.
0:15:38 We’re all one of a kind.
0:15:39 Yes.
0:15:44 But in a saturated world and a busy world, with so many facets of ourselves, you can
0:15:45 go in a million different directions.
0:15:48 You have a lot of choices.
0:15:54 So how have you chosen which pathways to explore, like interacting with these people on the
0:15:59 subway, playing some of the instruments you’ve played that I know were not assigned to you
0:16:00 at Juilliard?
0:16:01 Yes.
0:16:02 Yes.
0:16:03 Yes.
0:16:08 So how do you pick which aspects of yourself or which scent trails to explore?
0:16:16 You have to understand what is it that’s yearning to be expressed within you.
0:16:26 Even if you’re dreadfully afraid of it, you can have something within that seems so far
0:16:35 away from the reality of your current state that it couldn’t possibly be for you in your
0:16:37 mind.
0:16:42 And every fiber of your being is telling you, “This isn’t what I should be pursuing.
0:16:46 This isn’t who I am.”
0:16:47 That’s the one right there.
0:16:48 That one right there.
0:16:50 The scary one.
0:16:51 This isn’t who I am.
0:16:52 It won’t go away.
0:16:53 Yes.
0:16:57 But it sticks with you and you start to say, “Oh, it’s not going away.”
0:16:58 Could you give an example?
0:17:01 Do any examples come to mind for you personally?
0:17:09 Oh my gosh, well, performing for me, my first experiences with performing were traumatic
0:17:11 at best.
0:17:19 I mean, the level of performance anxiety that I still have is unbelievably paralyzing to
0:17:26 the point that I’ve developed mantras in different ways of reaching for what’s inside
0:17:32 and also just a greater sense of purpose and philosophy that really is a foundation that
0:17:38 lifts me to the point of taking the stage and sharing it because it’s bigger than oneself,
0:17:39 right?
0:17:42 And did you feel that yearning to perform?
0:17:43 Was it an image?
0:17:44 Was it a feeling?
0:17:45 Was that the yearning?
0:17:46 That was part of it.
0:17:51 I remember my first time on the talent show dancing, which is another aspect of it.
0:17:58 Something that I was not naturally accustomed to doing besides just that family functions.
0:18:01 And it wasn’t something that came natural to me.
0:18:10 I was more of someone who was a spiritual mover versus the most precise dancer.
0:18:13 But I went on a talent show with my best friend.
0:18:19 We were in elementary school at the time and he was a very natural dancer and he convinced
0:18:26 me to join him on the talent show stage in front of the entire school from K-8.
0:18:32 The whole school, all the teachers, everybody just gathered in the auditorium.
0:18:33 The music starts playing.
0:18:45 It was like some sort of decrepit Michael Jackson beat, like Fisher Price that you did.
0:18:52 It was going man and I get up there and I’m going and at this time what I knew was the
0:18:54 running man, MC Hammer.
0:18:55 I remember.
0:18:56 You know that?
0:18:57 Oh, of course.
0:18:58 But the pants parachuted.
0:18:59 Gotta be careful.
0:19:00 Can’t ride any horses without that.
0:19:01 Yeah.
0:19:03 You can dance with them on.
0:19:04 Yeah.
0:19:06 They riding the horse with that.
0:19:08 What kind of horse you got?
0:19:11 You got to get away from that.
0:19:14 I said, man, listen, let me try the running man.
0:19:15 That didn’t work.
0:19:16 Everything I turned to didn’t work.
0:19:19 Okay, let me try to do the moonwalk.
0:19:20 Keon just did it too.
0:19:21 That didn’t work.
0:19:29 It was a mix of cheers and laughter, both this sort of excitement by what he was doing from
0:19:34 the audience and also this sort of what is wrong with this child to think that he could
0:19:36 be up there.
0:19:43 I was mortified and I remember leaving that scenario and thinking I would never, I had
0:19:45 so many moments.
0:19:49 That’s the thing that I remember most about performance early on.
0:19:55 Every moment I tried to perform, I faced rejection and left thinking I don’t ever have to do
0:19:56 that again.
0:19:58 There’s nothing in that for me.
0:20:03 Now, fast forward, I’m thinking about that dancing moment because it came back to me
0:20:08 again a couple years ago when we were at the Grammys and we were rehearsal and I’m leading
0:20:19 this performance with 30 dancers and there’s a moment where we all run, the tape is probably
0:20:24 somewhere out there, but there’s a moment where we all run in place.
0:20:30 We break the fold while we jump into the audience and we run from the stage and the vision,
0:20:34 Jamel McWilliams and I, we were coming up with this vision of let’s just break through
0:20:35 the screen.
0:20:38 Let’s break through any pretense.
0:20:46 Let’s build an energy with our collective here, this group of us that just permeates
0:20:48 every soul watching.
0:20:53 I remember even saying at some point on the stage, touch the screen, get a blessing.
0:21:00 It was almost like Tony Robbins motivational speech meets Baptist church.
0:21:05 We got to this point where the energy, it was fierce, just like a shaman, just moving
0:21:06 the energy around.
0:21:09 We got to this running move and that was the launch of it all.
0:21:16 And I remembered thinking back to when I was that kid in second grade and I was almost
0:21:19 booed off the stage if it wasn’t for Keon, right?
0:21:25 And I’m doing this move at the Grammys and it’s happening in real time.
0:21:30 There’s a collective life force energy that’s coming from it and that’s the thing that creating
0:21:37 that moments like that moments long before that, whether it’s in the subway, just creating
0:21:39 that energy was the call.
0:21:45 That was what you were yearning for was creating the energy that type of electricity.
0:21:47 It’s electricity.
0:21:49 It’s community.
0:21:51 It’s what the world could be.
0:21:55 It’s an aspirational vision of, of us.
0:22:02 I thought for a while, like, what is the field that I enter into to create this or to cultivate
0:22:03 this?
0:22:04 What is that space?
0:22:10 And I didn’t have words for it for many years and it evolves over time and it requires performance.
0:22:15 But it’s so much, I’ve never said I shared this, but I didn’t think, I mean, we already
0:22:16 getting deep.
0:22:17 So why not?
0:22:18 So let’s go for it.
0:22:26 My idea has led me to places that in recent times, I don’t know how much longer I will
0:22:30 be performing or be a musician.
0:22:31 Why is that?
0:22:35 I’ve never said that, but it’s been coming up in the last, I mean, Sulayka and I have
0:22:40 talked about it before just because we have that type of relationship of exploring and
0:22:41 challenging each other.
0:22:50 But the form of the vocation is shifting and the gift of music for me and its meaning
0:22:54 in my life and its application within the vocation is also shifting.
0:22:59 Do you know where it’s shifting to or do you just feel the tectonic plates shifting
0:23:02 and you’re like, all right, let’s pause and pay attention.
0:23:05 How are you experiencing that shift, that shifting?
0:23:08 Man, it’s such an intuitive thing.
0:23:12 It’s such a trust-based relationship.
0:23:14 You don’t force it.
0:23:16 You don’t force it.
0:23:18 You can’t force it.
0:23:21 It just tells you when it’s time.
0:23:25 Is that a sensitivity that you think everybody has or do you think you have greater sensitivity
0:23:31 to feel that and to sit with it, even though it might be uncomfortable to not have a compass
0:23:34 pointing you in a certain direction?
0:23:44 I think those early years coupled with now by my own volition, but when I was in college,
0:23:49 there were times when they sent me for psychiatric evaluation.
0:23:56 In those early years, there may be some root to your first question about why I wasn’t
0:23:57 not speaking.
0:24:03 There may be some root within the way that my psyche was formed.
0:24:06 For me, also the superpower within that.
0:24:13 That’s allowed for me to develop a relationship with presence and with being that allows for
0:24:14 me to trust and have faith.
0:24:21 Also, just the natural state of an artist is to have complete faith, unwavering faith
0:24:26 in the ability for you to make this thing real that no one sees or can experience yet,
0:24:28 but you.
0:24:32 You have to do your best with words which fail to describe it.
0:24:35 You have to communicate to collaborators to potentially join the ranks of building this
0:24:36 thing.
0:24:37 Yeah, I do.
0:24:42 I think I want to turn this into a confessional on my part, so maybe for another time.
0:24:44 No, no, go for it.
0:24:46 Well, I do.
0:24:51 There are experiences on the maybe far end of the spectrum, you have mystical experiences
0:24:54 which by definition are ineffable.
0:24:57 They translate very poorly to words.
0:25:03 Then there are these felt senses and these evolved capabilities that also pre-day language,
0:25:11 so it’s very difficult if not impossible to apply clean prose to describing them.
0:25:15 To that extent, I do think I feel what you’re saying.
0:25:20 I’m curious, as these things are taking shape in your body and your mind, these things you
0:25:26 feel that are not yet externalized, how much of it is waiting and how much of it is tickling
0:25:32 the muse for these original concepts or ideas or impulses?
0:25:38 Are there ways that you help yourself to generate or be receptive to new directions and new
0:25:39 ideas?
0:25:46 You know, I was checking out Alfred Hitchcock the other night, Suspense.
0:25:55 If you think about the device of suspense in cinema that he mastered and you experienced
0:26:02 that through the things that he created, at least for me that was something that brought
0:26:11 me back to an understanding of the muse, which is this idea that suspense is created when
0:26:17 there are stakes and when you don’t know what’s going to happen on the other side.
0:26:25 So you then have to put everything on the line that you believe in that motivates you,
0:26:31 that powers you, you have to put it on the line in order to move toward whatever your
0:26:38 desired outcome is in a limited amount of time and sometimes without enough intel or
0:26:44 intellectual processing of the information to even know which direction you want to take
0:26:45 it in.
0:26:47 You just have the moment.
0:26:59 So for me, I love to create these pockets of suspense, these pockets of pressurized creativity
0:27:06 or pressurized experience that leads me to discovery, that it pushes me forward.
0:27:11 And I think about things that are not music like cinema or there’s so many things that
0:27:19 are not connected to the actual craft that I draw from much, much, much more than actually
0:27:25 thinking about the inspiration of music and the fruit of the craft itself.
0:27:32 So if we take a closer look at the stakes and the unknown, I’m wondering if I’m hearing
0:27:34 you correctly because that was just a week ago.
0:27:39 I had a conversation with a number of friends, having dinner, drinks, and I posed a question
0:27:44 which was what do you do when you get stuck or you’re feeling stuck and you want to push
0:27:47 yourself in a new direction?
0:27:51 And there were a lot of different answers, but there was one common thread which was
0:27:55 in effect, I need to book the theater so I write the play, a feeling of getting in over
0:28:01 your head where you commit to something and then you figure out what that thing is going
0:28:02 to be.
0:28:06 But now you have something like on the schedule, people are involved, and then you’re in the
0:28:08 dark, groping around, you kind of figure it out.
0:28:14 I’m wondering if you apply some version of that in your own life, if that’s what, in
0:28:21 a sense you mean by stakes and moving into the unknown or if it takes other forms.
0:28:27 That was the gateway drug, but what happens for me at this point is the zoom out, and
0:28:37 the zoom out is this perspective on all things, time, the perspective of your lineage, the
0:28:44 understanding of your lifespan, all these things that require you to zoom out to really
0:28:48 assess and feel in your marrow to grasp.
0:28:56 And it makes those commitments feel minor to me, even if they’re attached to some monetary
0:29:04 outcome or some consequence that is deemed dangerous by the way that we metrics on these
0:29:12 things almost become so irrelevant to me that it requires me to have another motivation
0:29:17 in order to really reach the thing that is most impactful and most resonant within.
0:29:20 What kind of motivation motivates you these days?
0:29:27 So when you have the zoom out, when I come back to the creative process, it almost has
0:29:33 to be the opposite of what it used to be, which is let me put myself in a position, throw
0:29:37 myself in the water and figure out how I’m going to evolve and do something.
0:29:42 Then it eventually went to how do I bridge this into a whole another craft?
0:29:43 How do I create?
0:29:49 That’s why I love the idea of what we call genres, which are just silos that promote
0:29:50 ignorance.
0:29:52 That’s fun for me.
0:29:53 That’s not based on a truth.
0:29:59 So the zoom out helps you to assess all the truths, the laws.
0:30:00 This is what is, right?
0:30:07 And then the motivation has to come in the opposite way of force.
0:30:11 It has to come almost like a dream comes to you in the night.
0:30:18 You can’t do anything about your dreams per se, but feed the dream machine.
0:30:24 You can’t generate the opportunity for you to have a certain dream.
0:30:32 You can perhaps interact with your dream once it arrives and it’s so ephemeral.
0:30:38 Even remembering your dreams oftentimes can be difficult depending on what space you are
0:30:39 in your life.
0:30:46 It makes everything that happens delicate and it makes everything that I commit to in
0:30:50 some ways very tenuous when it comes to the mammoth mechanics of our industry.
0:30:56 And I’m getting to a point, which is a part of the realization where perhaps there’s not
0:31:02 a context within the industry and the mechanics therein that as they exist today, that I can
0:31:08 find true inspiration from and that I can connect the dots of my, there’s a constellation
0:31:15 of inspiration that crosses so many spectrums of society and I can’t access it if I play
0:31:16 by these rules.
0:31:17 Yeah.
0:31:23 If you’re in the silo playing by the laws and quotation marks, right?
0:31:24 Exactly.
0:31:29 And the zoom out gives you such a perspective on that, that it makes you fiercely prepared
0:31:35 for when the dream comes because then you’ll embrace it because it’s your top priority.
0:31:39 It’s the chief motivation, but you can’t make it come.
0:31:40 Yeah.
0:31:42 But you’re primed to receive it when it shows up.
0:31:43 You’re ready.
0:31:48 So when I don’t have inspiration or I have a block, I do nothing.
0:31:56 I live and it’s absolutely because of the deeper inspiration that I’m blessed to feel.
0:31:58 I feel it’s been cultivated.
0:32:02 I’m connected to it and I know it’s real.
0:32:03 It doesn’t have to greet me every day.
0:32:04 I know it’s there.
0:32:05 Like an old friend.
0:32:07 Not a lot of maintenance required.
0:32:08 Yes.
0:32:15 This requires you to be focused and be ready when it’s there.
0:32:18 So let’s say the muse makes an appearance.
0:32:25 You’re receptive and you’re not grasping, but your hands are ready to catch, right?
0:32:29 And then you go into execution mode on whatever it might be or you start exploring.
0:32:35 I want to come back to something you mentioned, which was the performance anxiety and the
0:32:38 mantras and various things you used to ground you.
0:32:42 What are the mantras that you have landed on?
0:32:43 I haven’t shared all of them.
0:32:49 I share some, two of them we share at the shows when we perform often.
0:32:55 One is one that I thought of for children and I thought of for the child within me.
0:32:57 And it’s I feel good.
0:32:58 I feel free.
0:33:03 I feel fine just being me and you go over and over and over and over.
0:33:04 I feel good.
0:33:05 I feel free.
0:33:07 I feel fine just being me.
0:33:08 Circular melody.
0:33:12 I feel good today, oh so good today.
0:33:13 I feel good.
0:33:14 I feel free.
0:33:16 I feel fine.
0:33:20 One, two, three, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
0:33:22 So everybody sings along automatically.
0:33:23 I’ve seen it.
0:33:29 I’ve seen it because I was in Moody Theater in Austin watching this just extend into the
0:33:30 audience.
0:33:31 Yes.
0:33:32 It’s amazing to watch.
0:33:34 It’s amazing to experience and participate in too.
0:33:40 I was so, man, that was such a great feeling seeing you there.
0:33:43 Just because I understand you get it on so many levels.
0:33:47 You really understand it’s such a spiritual practice.
0:33:54 It’s not so much about me showing up and playing instruments.
0:33:58 Look at how great the band, look at the dance, look at the more and more, more and more.
0:34:04 And it always has been, but more and more, how do we continue to refine this spiritual
0:34:10 practice, this ritual of community, of sharing, of artistry, all of it?
0:34:12 And what do we point it at?
0:34:16 What do we focus this life force energy at next?
0:34:22 So those mantras for me, if you don’t live it and it’s not a part of you, it’s not going
0:34:24 to come out of the instrument.
0:34:26 What we play is life.
0:34:28 What we create is life.
0:34:33 The quality of the human being, the quality of the vessel, even a broken vessel, which
0:34:38 is oftentimes the most effective, the most relatable, the most universal.
0:34:44 But there has to be that space in you that you’ve saved that is the sacred space.
0:34:52 It doesn’t have to be, of course, there are great ways to cultivate physical world, sacred
0:34:54 places and practices.
0:35:00 So for me, those mantras and my prayers, in that sense of understanding how to always
0:35:01 know if that’s there.
0:35:05 And if it’s not there, it might be time to take six months a year, whatever I need to
0:35:09 take off so that then I can know that it’s there.
0:35:14 Right now, I’m in a period where it’s very strong.
0:35:22 So it allows for me to be fearless, which is something that I haven’t felt that this strongly
0:35:23 in a while.
0:35:25 Yeah, gotta ride the wave, then.
0:35:26 You know what I mean?
0:35:30 Yeah, you got a paddle for the wave.
0:35:31 Yeah.
0:35:35 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:36:38 What other mantras can you share?
0:36:40 Oh, man, this is deep.
0:36:41 You going in.
0:36:42 I’m going in.
0:36:43 I’m going in.
0:36:44 Scuba gear intact.
0:36:45 Tim.
0:36:46 Yeah.
0:36:47 Yeah.
0:36:48 You know.
0:36:50 Because I believe in the power of mantras.
0:36:51 Oh, you?
0:36:52 I do.
0:37:01 In meditation, in repetition, the ability to, in a sense, end up with the mind of no mind
0:37:02 to cleanse the palate.
0:37:07 I mean, there’s so many different ways you can use mantras also, which is why this is
0:37:09 as deeply interesting to me.
0:37:10 It can be a concentration practice.
0:37:15 It can be sort of an erasing practice to regain some equilibrium.
0:37:17 There’s so many different ways to use repetition.
0:37:19 It could be drumming too.
0:37:22 It doesn’t have to be, could be instrumental.
0:37:30 There are so many different ways that you can enter unusual, uncommon states using repetition.
0:37:33 So I’m very, very interested in this, which is why I’m asking.
0:37:34 Yes, for sure.
0:37:40 So two of the ones that I, not for stage, but just more for crisis that I go to is be
0:37:43 still and know, which is from the Bible.
0:37:45 Be still and know that I am God.
0:37:54 It is this idea that I’ll give you a practice so be still and know that I am God.
0:37:57 Be still and know that I am.
0:38:05 Be still and know that I, be still and know that, be still and know, be still, be.
0:38:11 Just this idea, I’ve sat with that and each phrase has a different meaning.
0:38:20 Even be still and then breath or room tone, there’s messages in that, that space, there’s
0:38:22 messages in the crevice.
0:38:30 So I’ve done that and sat in that and it’s changed my entire perspective on a crisis
0:38:37 or something that I felt perhaps I was wrong, but perhaps, you know, there’s so many opportunities
0:38:46 for us in this life to transmute darkness into light or even darkness into perspective.
0:38:50 Another one is, “Thy will be done,” which is one of surrender.
0:38:56 Now, we believe there’s a divine power, there’s, however you name it, whatever your relationship
0:39:03 to it is, we’ve, for the most part, had an experience, there’s something beyond explanation.
0:39:09 The universe is carrying us in some way, “Thy will be done,” is trusting that there’s a
0:39:12 divine logic to it all.
0:39:16 When there’s nothing that you can do, “Thy will be done,” “Thy will be done,” “Thy will
0:39:24 be done,” because the belief of this divine logic allows for you to understand that there’s
0:39:29 a path and you are accounted for in that path.
0:39:34 You are accounted for, there’s so much that is allowed for you to be, the culmination
0:39:40 of so many things has led to you and there will never be another you, you the only one.
0:39:46 That specificity alone is something that comes to me when I’m in that “Thy will be done.”
0:39:52 It’s a revelation of so many other things, which is also allowing for the right thing
0:39:58 to occur and for me to be accepting of it, versus for me to control it without knowledge
0:40:01 of what the true right thing is.
0:40:08 There’s so much that you have to cleanse yourself of from believing, from holding on to that’s
0:40:13 not actually connected to the best outcome, but you can’t always know that, especially
0:40:14 in crisis.
0:40:15 It’s very hard to know.
0:40:18 Many parables are always like, “This, this happened.
0:40:19 Such good news.
0:40:20 Maybe.”
0:40:21 Right.
0:40:22 “Such and such happened.
0:40:23 This is terrible.
0:40:24 Maybe.”
0:40:28 It just depends on so many things outside of our sphere of knowledge that on so many levels
0:40:29 can’t be known.
0:40:34 When would you be inclined to say to yourself that last mantra?
0:40:36 When would you apply that in your life?
0:40:41 There’s so many things that happen to us with our health.
0:40:43 I talk about Sulaika a lot.
0:40:45 I love her as you know.
0:40:46 She’s great.
0:40:47 Yeah.
0:40:48 Had her on the show.
0:40:49 Yes.
0:40:54 And I also borrow a lot of phrases from her, in particular, this idea of being between
0:41:00 two kingdoms, this idea of the kingdom of the well, the kingdom of the sick.
0:41:04 And we all exist in this in-between space.
0:41:10 And we have a passport for both, which is something that she created this understanding
0:41:15 of that through the way she lives through it, the way she gracefully moves through this
0:41:22 time with such grace, with such power, with such clarity.
0:41:24 I think about that.
0:41:31 I think about how there’s a certain surrender that’s required of all of us in times when
0:41:34 we deal with health challenges, whether it’s us or a loved one.
0:41:39 And you find yourself in moments where there’s literally nothing that you can do to take
0:41:45 away pain or to take away the unknown and the anxiety of waiting.
0:41:50 So that’s an opportunity for a great amount of growth.
0:41:57 That’s an opportunity for a lesson to be instilled in a way that almost nothing else that I can
0:42:01 think of affords you the chance for.
0:42:02 That will be done.
0:42:03 That will be done.
0:42:04 Yeah.
0:42:06 This is a coach I worked with for a while.
0:42:10 He used to say, “This is your pop quiz from the universe.”
0:42:13 When something unexpected would pop up, he’d be like, “All right, all that meditation you’ve
0:42:14 been doing.”
0:42:15 Let’s see it.
0:42:16 Let’s see it.
0:42:17 Let’s see, bro.
0:42:18 Come on, bro.
0:42:19 You’ve been rehearsing.
0:42:20 This is game time.
0:42:21 Let’s see how it goes.
0:42:22 Yeah.
0:42:23 Yeah.
0:42:27 Oh, Tim, you know what I’m saying when you’re in that moment.
0:42:28 Yeah.
0:42:32 I’ve had a lot of sympathy for watching you both go through that journey, and I can only
0:42:33 imagine what it’s like.
0:42:38 I have been, of course, and most people listening have been in a position where they feel powerless
0:42:42 to help or they don’t know how to help a loved one.
0:42:51 But I’ve had a lot of sympathy for a challenging road and also really been in awe of how much
0:42:58 growth both of you have exhibited through the challenges and pain and so on.
0:42:59 In any case, I just wanted to say that.
0:43:00 Oh, man.
0:43:09 It means a lot to hear that, and it feels so much of the time as odd as it may sound.
0:43:16 It feels like a privilege to go through it together in the way that we have seen it.
0:43:24 It’s shifted into almost the orientation of blessing, and that’s not to say that the
0:43:28 difficulties are any easier, right?
0:43:30 It doesn’t change the nature of hard things.
0:43:32 They’re hard.
0:43:36 But there’s something about life.
0:43:37 There’s a truth.
0:43:46 There’s something about going through the fire that is so required and something about suffering
0:43:48 that is so essential.
0:43:57 This idea that we’re meant to run from pain or run from difficult things and find the
0:44:05 most leisurely and completely frictionless existence possible.
0:44:06 It’s such a lie.
0:44:13 It’s not just a lie because it’s not possible, but if it were possible, that would kill you
0:44:14 the most.
0:44:18 It would rob you in so many ways, which is, of course, easy for me to say, sitting in
0:44:22 this comfortable chair right now, but in the midst of it, it’s sometimes hard to see it.
0:44:28 At the same time, there was an astrophysicist, Jan 11, who was on the podcast some time ago,
0:44:32 and I’m going to butcher this quote, but it’s more the concept for me that has really
0:44:33 stuck.
0:44:37 She said, “Something along the lines of, I used to look for the underlying path that
0:44:40 would help me navigate around obstacles, and then I realized there is no underlying
0:44:41 path.
0:44:49 The obstacles are the path through which you discover yourself, through which you learn,
0:44:50 through which you grow.”
0:44:51 That is the path.
0:44:52 That’s the path.
0:44:53 Take those away.
0:44:54 That’s it.
0:44:59 Then you’re just a free-floating essence of comfort.
0:45:01 That’s just not the human experience.
0:45:02 Yay.
0:45:04 Also, you’re talking about blessings.
0:45:09 I could imagine, even an earlier version of me would say, “Oh, come on now.”
0:45:13 I suppose it’s helpful, but maybe it’s delusional and it’s overly optimistic, but it’s deeper
0:45:14 than that.
0:45:22 I think that misses the mark because given a longer timeframe, given all the unknowns,
0:45:23 it could be a blessing.
0:45:27 It could be a curse, but you can’t know which it is over time, and it depends a lot on your
0:45:30 perspective, so you might as well choose a blessing.
0:45:36 That is the more enabling perspective, and since you can’t know, it’s a coin flip.
0:45:41 Choose the side of the coin that is most enabling, it seems to me at least, in the abstract.
0:45:43 It’s easy to say.
0:45:44 Taxi runs over my foot.
0:45:47 We’ll see how I do later today.
0:45:52 It’s that, and it’s also, you only will know when you are there.
0:45:54 You have to go there to know there.
0:46:00 You will only know what it can be for you when you’re in the fire.
0:46:05 Everybody can talk about what they would do when they are there.
0:46:13 We can all say, “Man, if that would have happened to me, I would slay the dragon.”
0:46:20 Whatever you think you would do, most often is not what you would do, and that’s not
0:46:23 because you’re not who you think you are.
0:46:27 It’s because there’s so many other factors you can’t know.
0:46:32 For many things in my life that I think about, the things I’ve learned the most from are
0:46:37 when I’ve embraced the discomfort and realized what I was made of through it.
0:46:40 Let me just sit with that for a second.
0:46:45 Do you have, and then we’re going to rewind the clock, and I want to go back to very young
0:46:49 John with a question or two, but do you have any favorite failures?
0:46:54 Now, I put failures in quotation marks because this is something that at the time seemed
0:47:03 crushing or seemed awful that actually in some way set the stage for much bigger or better
0:47:04 things later.
0:47:11 Do you have any of those types of slips or rejections or failures that come to mind?
0:47:12 Wow.
0:47:15 I feel like my life is riddled with them.
0:47:23 And I also feel like I move through them fairly quickly, not cavalier, but there’s a sense
0:47:27 of understanding it now that I didn’t have then.
0:47:28 Yeah.
0:47:29 How do you move through them quickly?
0:47:31 Why do you think that is?
0:47:36 It’s because I know they’re for my own good, not that they’re all for my own good.
0:47:41 I guess the reason is because I don’t actually believe that failure exists.
0:47:45 It’s not that it’s necessarily for your own good, but failure doesn’t exist.
0:47:49 It’s opportunity for you to take something from the experience.
0:47:55 And even if the experience is reinforcing something that you already know, it’s reinforcing
0:47:57 something that you already know.
0:48:02 It’s an opportunity for you to see this experience, this thing that you wanted, this thing that
0:48:06 maybe you hoped would work out, but didn’t work out.
0:48:11 All of that adds to the fabric and the richness of your character and your experience and
0:48:16 your knowledge base so that you, as I said, you go there to know that you’ve been there.
0:48:18 I’ve traveled that road.
0:48:19 I’ve played those notes.
0:48:21 I know that piece.
0:48:22 I sung that song.
0:48:23 I own that.
0:48:29 And there’s always on the other side of everything, the opportunity for transformation.
0:48:36 Can you tell a story of any, I’m not going to use the word failure, growth opportunities
0:48:42 that you encountered before you turned into John Batiste and kind of marquee lights, right?
0:48:46 Because you’ve really popped in a huge way since I first met you ages ago in probably
0:48:48 Utah or wherever we happened to be.
0:48:55 I can’t remember initially where it was, but before that, can you tell the story of any
0:49:01 incidents where things didn’t go your way and how you metabolized it?
0:49:09 I grew up in between Canada, Louisiana, which is a very old school, Southern town, old country,
0:49:15 railroad tracks running through the middle of it with canals, provincial, Southern town,
0:49:16 just outside of New Orleans.
0:49:20 New Orleans is another planet.
0:49:25 And I grew up as a kid getting bullied for all types of things, man.
0:49:29 When I was in school, I’d get bullied whether it was, “Are you okay?
0:49:30 Are you with us?”
0:49:33 Or, “Are you slow?”
0:49:41 Your feet, your nose, your hair, all these aspects of self-esteem that were attacked.
0:49:48 So then you go through life in the early years with no real understanding of what you have
0:49:51 of value to offer the world, what you have to connect.
0:49:57 So fast forward, you get to a point where you discover music, but it’s still something
0:50:01 that amongst my family, I was the youngest and least talented.
0:50:04 When I was growing up, I didn’t think that I would ever be a performer because there
0:50:07 were 30 other people who had that covered.
0:50:08 It wasn’t like–
0:50:12 That’s just wild to try to paint a picture of that in my mind.
0:50:14 That’s a lot of performers, yeah.
0:50:15 People don’t get that.
0:50:22 They think, “Oh, you were born with a tambourine in your hand and you came out singing.”
0:50:23 This is not the case.
0:50:25 There was a glorious awkwardness.
0:50:29 That was a decade or more before I touched the instrument.
0:50:34 I started at 11 years old, late bloomer, in the context of everybody around me.
0:50:38 Now, there was so many bad gigs, bad performances.
0:50:41 And I was known as the kid who would play expressionless.
0:50:47 I would be playing and it would be all well and good, but my face would have no expression,
0:50:48 none.
0:50:50 It would be like I was shut off.
0:50:55 So I get to the point where there’s a long period of hours and hours in the practice
0:50:59 room and performances between 14 and 17.
0:51:00 Where were you at the time still?
0:51:01 In New Orleans.
0:51:02 In New Orleans.
0:51:06 Living in Kennet, going back and forth in New Orleans, performing at night, going to
0:51:07 two schools at once.
0:51:11 Just this idea that you had the art school in that evening, then in the morning you had
0:51:13 an academic school.
0:51:22 Still getting bullied, still also becoming somewhat of a young musical phenom, but not
0:51:23 the best one.
0:51:29 So there’s still not really like … You don’t really know where you fit or where it’s all
0:51:30 gone.
0:51:37 And was at that point, was piano the key to that phenom perception?
0:51:38 It was the piano.
0:51:40 That was the thing.
0:51:47 That was something that I’d alternate between playing in clubs at 14, 15 years old that
0:51:52 I wasn’t supposed to be in at night after going to school.
0:51:58 And then I would also on the weekends be doing classical piano lessons and piano competitions.
0:52:04 So alternate between those two realities and also going and really finding this sort of
0:52:11 tribe, my peers, starting bands with first my cousins, Travis and Jamal, who are older
0:52:13 and multi-instrumental and inspired me.
0:52:20 Then Troy, Trombone Shorty, Andrews, who’s maybe at the time we met 11 or 12, he’d been
0:52:23 playing for a decade and touring the world.
0:52:27 So we start bands, we’re doing club shows, we’re doing all these things and constantly
0:52:32 just presenting things that are experimental and pushing ourselves to do things that we’ve
0:52:33 never done.
0:52:42 I didn’t have a desire or a real push to go into music until I was maybe 17.
0:52:45 And I moved to New York on my own in the first story of failure.
0:52:46 Yeah.
0:52:47 Pleasure for one sec.
0:52:48 So okay.
0:52:49 That’s a cliffhanger.
0:52:50 So first story of failure.
0:52:51 Yes.
0:52:57 What did the conversation look like when you’re informing friends and family that you’re gonna
0:52:58 move to New York?
0:52:59 All right.
0:53:00 What was the drive behind this?
0:53:02 How did that go?
0:53:04 And then we’re gonna get back to the cliffhanger.
0:53:08 I felt like there was a great deal of support.
0:53:15 My mother is a visionary when it comes to understanding what someone could be.
0:53:22 She was the driving force of the piano being the instrument that I focused on at 11 versus
0:53:24 several other things that were in the periphery.
0:53:26 I could have chosen the drums.
0:53:31 Just in brief, why did she think that was a clutch move?
0:53:33 I don’t understand how she does it, but she does it.
0:53:35 Or she just saw.
0:53:36 That’s the thing.
0:53:37 That’s a thing.
0:53:38 You have a piano player inside of you.
0:53:39 Yes.
0:53:40 Yes.
0:53:48 Even if she didn’t see that fully, she saw that the piano is the right direction for
0:53:50 you to take in music.
0:53:54 Because it’s the option that opens up the most options or is there more to it?
0:53:56 I don’t know if she had a vision.
0:54:03 She mentioned sometimes that there’s a sophistication to the piano that she was attracted to that
0:54:10 felt like it was the instrument for someone who is going to apply all of their forces
0:54:13 and all of their abilities.
0:54:14 It’s the conductor’s instrument.
0:54:16 It’s the maestro’s instrument.
0:54:18 So I know that that was a part of her thinking.
0:54:26 It’s the thing that’s going to allow for you to be as high-brow or as low-brow as you want.
0:54:27 I think it was a smirk.
0:54:36 It seems maybe self-evident to say, but very prescient, incredibly powerful, deeply directing.
0:54:40 Because when I look at what you’re capable of doing, part of the reason it seems to me
0:54:46 that you’re able to harness this broad spectrum of options is because you have that high-brow
0:54:48 card to pull out.
0:54:52 If people want to nitpick or they want to do this and this, you’re like, “All right.
0:54:53 Let me just sit down for a second.”
0:54:59 Then they’re like, “Okay, I take it back,” which buys you permission to do a really
0:55:01 wide range of things.
0:55:02 Yes.
0:55:03 Yes.
0:55:04 That is her thing.
0:55:07 She’s very clairvoyant.
0:55:09 It’s also a leadership quality she has.
0:55:15 She was environmentalist before it was the in vogue thing to do for many years.
0:55:20 She would, at a different time, not having been born in the South, a black woman like
0:55:22 her would be a CEO of a company.
0:55:25 It’s a different thing that she has.
0:55:31 It’s significant to think about now in retrospect all the decisions that she made, which eventually
0:55:38 led to me graduating high school a year early, moving to New York as a minor at 17.
0:55:40 Her supporting that.
0:55:45 My dad also supporting that as a musical mentor, my first musical mentor.
0:55:49 He was the one who was like, “Okay, New York is what cats really play, bro.”
0:55:56 In New Orleans, we play, and then there’s a legit thing with the cats in New York.
0:56:00 They’re a little stiff, but you’ll learn a lot.
0:56:03 He supported that too from a different angle, right?
0:56:08 I went up there and he’s like, “If you can make it in there, you have a lot to come back
0:56:09 with.
0:56:12 The vision was never, ‘Oh, you’ll go there and stay.”
0:56:13 Stay there.
0:56:14 You did.
0:56:15 I do, too.
0:56:19 So, you were saying your first failure, so you get to New York.
0:56:20 What happens?
0:56:22 It’s a disaster.
0:56:24 Man, listen.
0:56:27 Molly’s like, “I’m listening.”
0:56:28 You dig?
0:56:36 I went to New York and within the first week, I’m in the subway traveling around and I
0:56:38 pass out on the platform.
0:56:39 Pass out on the platform?
0:56:41 Yeah, as I’m out.
0:56:43 I’m like, “What’s going on?
0:56:44 What’s happening here?”
0:56:45 This doesn’t happen a lot.
0:56:46 You pay attention to this.
0:56:48 Molly’s sitting right next to you.
0:56:49 “Hello, Molly.”
0:56:50 Hey.
0:56:51 My external nervous system.
0:56:52 Hey.
0:56:53 So, you pass out on the platform?
0:56:54 Yes.
0:56:55 Yes.
0:56:56 That sounds dangerous.
0:56:57 Yeah, very dangerous.
0:57:02 Luckily, there were some friends there who could catch me and take me to, which at this
0:57:04 time, it was things Roosevelt, the ER.
0:57:08 The one that’s right next to Lincoln Center, maybe near Fordham.
0:57:09 We went there.
0:57:10 I’m there.
0:57:15 Oh, you’re exhausted and maybe you’re having some migraines or something.
0:57:18 They give me Tylenol, tell me to go away.
0:57:19 I’m having night sweats.
0:57:25 I’m basically feeling this sharp pain in my lung and then I start to pass out again.
0:57:27 I feel this intensity.
0:57:32 Meanwhile, the second day that I was there, before all this happened, I’m in the dorms
0:57:33 at Juilliard.
0:57:34 I’m unpacking.
0:57:35 I’m doing all the things.
0:57:36 The bunk is up.
0:57:43 I fall off the bunk and basically fracture rib, if not close to it, they do the x-ray.
0:57:48 They’re like, “You got a lot happening, but now this is the wildest part.”
0:57:50 I go back to the ER.
0:57:56 They say you have walking pneumonia that you’ve had for two weeks.
0:58:01 You have to stay here overnight over a few days while we give you the IV fluids and the
0:58:03 antibiotics and all the things.
0:58:07 I missed the orientation of the school year.
0:58:10 I missed all the things that you get acclimated to.
0:58:12 There’s nobody in New York.
0:58:17 I have a second cousin who lives in Harlem who I get acquainted with and we become closer
0:58:18 during this time.
0:58:22 I remember thinking, “Am I supposed to be here from falling off the bunk?”
0:58:24 I’m like, “No, I can’t miss this.”
0:58:25 I go back.
0:58:26 I’m just in there.
0:58:27 Next thing, I’m fainting in the subway.
0:58:28 “Oh, man.
0:58:29 I’m just exhausted.
0:58:30 I got to cool out.”
0:58:34 I’m in the nights of sweat and something’s happening.
0:58:36 That’s my lungs crying out.
0:58:37 You’ve had pneumonia.
0:58:40 You’ve been walking around with this.
0:58:47 Between that being the first year of me being in New York, first time at Juilliard, first
0:58:53 time being away from home, it completely felt like a crash and burn scenario.
0:58:56 It’s time for you to get out of here.
0:58:58 All the signs point to the exit.
0:59:02 Things telling me at this time internally, as I’m sitting in the hospital, I remember
0:59:03 those days.
0:59:05 It was like three or four days I was there.
0:59:12 I felt this sort of … As a kid, you’re like, “I don’t want to tell my parents, but
0:59:15 I also don’t feel like I belong here.
0:59:17 I need to get out of here.”
0:59:25 It’s also this kind of … There was a dichotomy of coming from this very rich cultural heritage
0:59:32 and this beautiful expression of excellence and pedagogy, but Juilliard being this European
0:59:40 classical legitimizing entity that especially as a young black kid pushing the boundaries
0:59:47 of what, generationally, my family has achieved and also musically eventually wanting to become
0:59:53 a disruptor from inside of all of it and just in the most benevolent way, rip it all down
0:59:56 and build it again in a different way.
1:00:01 Knowing that that was somewhat of a motivation and then landing and sort of dead on arrival
1:00:08 felt like it was ultimately the type of failure that it almost not only made me go home, but
1:00:09 quit music.
1:00:11 Just kind of just like, “This isn’t my profession.
1:00:13 I can just go home.”
1:00:17 I had a whole bunch of things I could have done other than this.
1:00:21 You know, the sitting there by yourself thinking about, “Is this a message?”
1:00:23 So what happened?
1:00:24 You’re here?
1:00:28 What resurrected the confidence or the direction?
1:00:30 Just the inner knowing, man.
1:00:31 You got to just know.
1:00:32 All right.
1:00:33 Hold on.
1:00:34 Hold on.
1:00:35 I don’t have a … I believe you.
1:00:38 I believe you and I underscore it and you’re a sensitive guy.
1:00:41 When I say sensitive, I mean your instrumentation is sensitive.
1:00:46 You’re like a jewelry scale, not some scale at the sports club in New York that’s five
1:00:47 pounds off.
1:00:48 You’re down to the nanogram.
1:00:50 So you have sensitive instrumentation.
1:00:56 If you’re thinking to yourself, “Man, I really thought A, B, and C, here I am.
1:01:01 I’ve had this 12 car pileup of disasters.
1:01:02 Maybe I should just go home.”
1:01:08 What did the little whisper say that started to tilt it back in the other direction towards
1:01:09 that inner knowing?
1:01:11 What was the feeling?
1:01:12 That’s one question.
1:01:15 If you want to take it a different angle, I would say, “Let’s say there’s a kid 10
1:01:17 years from now.”
1:01:19 I believe you.
1:01:20 Very similar.
1:01:21 Kenner, Louisiana.
1:01:24 It’s at your yard and sends you a letter.
1:01:26 All these things have happened.
1:01:30 Different set of disasters because I really don’t know if this is for me.
1:01:32 I could go back and do A, B, and C.
1:01:37 So very similar situation and he’s like, “Maybe he has an inner knowing, but you don’t know.”
1:01:38 What do you say to that kid?
1:01:39 Would be another way.
1:01:42 You can take it whichever direction makes sense.
1:01:47 So youngster, take your time to find the prize.
1:01:49 There’s no rush.
1:01:50 Pace yourself.
1:01:53 What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is what they say.
1:01:56 But until you experience it, that’s the only way.
1:02:04 The texture that added to me immediately in retrospect is why I continue.
1:02:14 The inner knowing that these experiences which are just a series of unfortunate things at
1:02:22 an unfortunate time can be exacerbated in your mind and in your psyche, especially if
1:02:23 you stew in it.
1:02:31 So I think, and I will tell this to the youngster, that happening to you is the gift of your
1:02:38 arrival because it allows for you to figure out upon entry how to process all of the
1:02:43 discomfort that’s to come in different forms, in different ways.
1:02:45 So pace yourself.
1:02:47 Take your time.
1:02:48 It’s your time.
1:02:51 It doesn’t all have to happen right now.
1:02:56 As I’m listening, you describe the gift of these unfortunate events because it’s preparing
1:02:57 you for the discomfort to come.
1:03:03 It makes me think of psychological and spiritual calluses to, “Oh, now you can do some real
1:03:04 heavy lifting.”
1:03:05 Yeah, yeah.
1:03:06 Not you.
1:03:07 Yeah.
1:03:08 Yeah.
1:03:09 Yeah.
1:03:10 Yeah.
1:03:11 That’s right.
1:03:16 So the sensitivities I want to double click on again just for a second because personally,
1:03:20 and I’ve seen this in friends, busy, busy, busy, go, go, go, 100 miles an hour, trying
1:03:22 to do everything all at once.
1:03:27 And that hasn’t been me forever, but there have been periods of time when I’m like that.
1:03:36 And when I’m in that gear, I wouldn’t say that if someone were to ask me, “Do you feel
1:03:40 a deep sense of inner knowing about where you’re going to be a year or two from now where
1:03:41 you want to be?”
1:03:42 I’d say, “No.”
1:03:48 However, if I slowed down a bit, if I decluttered my mind a bit, not necessarily watching paint
1:03:53 dry, but I create the space, whether it’s through meditating, whether it’s through exercise
1:03:57 of a certain type, like I just did archery before I came here, which clears my mind really
1:04:06 well, then the volume of the competing voices in my head has been lowered enough that I can
1:04:07 hear things, right?
1:04:12 And I’m wondering if you have ways to do that for yourself, or if the signal is just
1:04:14 so strong, you don’t need to do that.
1:04:18 But I mean, you have a lot of projects and commitments, and I’m sure you have a million
1:04:20 opportunities presented to you.
1:04:27 When things get noisy, how do you help yourself to hear the inner feelings and voice and so
1:04:31 on so that it doesn’t get drowned out?
1:04:39 Man, Tim, we have to own what’s been entrusted to us to own.
1:04:50 We really have so much that is divinely bestowed upon us, and you wake up every day as a steward
1:04:56 of it all, and then you get up and you have a choice, “Do I pick up my phone?
1:05:02 Do I give my mainframe away to some other thoughts or ideas or visions or distraction
1:05:04 if you want to even call it that?”
1:05:07 It’s a choice, whatever.
1:05:13 How did I set that intention prior to laying down the rest?
1:05:16 What am I feeding into my psyche?
1:05:18 What am I watching, the eye gate?
1:05:20 What am I listening to?
1:05:25 That’s why I make music a certain way, because I know that for some, that’s going to be a
1:05:28 fueling prerequisite for them.
1:05:31 It’s going to be there, fertile ground.
1:05:34 Yeah, something powerful is going to emerge from that.
1:05:41 For me, it’s like owning a car or you have this.
1:05:45 You have this thing, it’s on lease, and to me, that’s it.
1:05:51 I don’t try to hear, as I was saying before, it’s like a dream if it comes.
1:05:59 I don’t rely on that to be the thing, and I have ways like for you, archery connects
1:06:02 you or primes you to be connected.
1:06:09 I’ve strayed away from the desire to have this mystical encounter at every turn in
1:06:13 order to prove the existence of, be still and know.
1:06:15 This is for funny how that’s come.
1:06:23 When you evoke these mantras, I’m telling you, man, but that’s not a real thing.
1:06:28 That’s not a real need for me to own what I’ve been given.
1:06:34 To own what I’ve been given also, when it comes to how to be primed to hear and to
1:06:42 receive the download, it’s found in the mundane things and also the basic things.
1:06:43 Do you drink enough water?
1:06:45 Do you get enough sleep?
1:06:48 Do you feel your heart would love when you can?
1:06:51 Do you feel your mind with good things?
1:06:58 Not even just things that are of good report, of course, it’s great, but also information
1:07:01 that will empower you with what you have.
1:07:05 For me, I’ve studied music as an empowering force for what I have.
1:07:09 I’ve studied many things, music being chief among them.
1:07:12 That’s going to ignite me based on what I’ve been given.
1:07:14 What ignites you?
1:07:19 How do you surround yourself with all of that, and then, okay, we have a sense of that to
1:07:21 some degree.
1:07:23 We have a lot of experts in that to some level.
1:07:29 The flip is, how do you cultivate giving it all the way, all the time?
1:07:30 How do you give it?
1:07:33 The measure of your greatness is the measure of your generosity.
1:07:34 How do you give it?
1:07:40 Now, this is sharing the thing that you have on lease, this thing you’ve been endowed with.
1:07:44 It’s hard because you can cultivate portals of giving.
1:07:46 You can donate.
1:07:52 You can give your time, which is the highest level of giving in terms of intentionally
1:07:56 giving of your time is the highest level that you can go.
1:08:02 But can you give of your time and your resources and your energy in a way that’s not regulated
1:08:06 by a portal or something that you set up in advance?
1:08:09 Can you live in a posture of giving?
1:08:13 Can you create a generous temple within?
1:08:21 And can you walk through the world and live in a space where you’re unfettered and unbothered
1:08:28 by the need, but also you’ve preserved, you’ve maintained the vessel so that you don’t completely
1:08:31 rid yourself of your life force energy.
1:08:34 You don’t want to be drained.
1:08:38 There’s many things that can drain you and pull from you, and there’s darkness in the
1:08:39 world.
1:08:43 And then the discernment comes with this sort of awareness.
1:08:48 And there’s spaces in time when I’m much, much more aligned with that.
1:08:56 And it’s so clear in so many moments of the deepest, most lasting impact and inspiration
1:09:00 have happened when I’m in that space, but it’s maintenance.
1:09:04 It comes back to like, it’s so simple.
1:09:06 It’s so simple.
1:09:10 And we feel good when we do that because that’s how the machine was made.
1:09:11 We have joy when we do that.
1:09:13 We feel purpose when we do that.
1:09:16 It’s like the machine was made a certain way.
1:09:20 You take care of the machine that you have is going to function a certain way.
1:09:23 Yeah, you got to do the maintenance.
1:09:26 May not be sexy, but the machine needs maintenance.
1:09:29 That thing needs, come on.
1:09:31 Get it together.
1:09:33 Come on, doctor.
1:09:34 Just a few more questions.
1:09:35 I’m having too much fun.
1:09:40 I can go for six or four hours, but if you could put something metaphorically speaking
1:09:46 on a billboard, right, so this isn’t an advertisement, it’s to get a message, feeling a quote, anything
1:09:48 out to the world.
1:09:52 Just pretend that hundreds of millions of people would see it, billions who knows.
1:09:53 Could be anything.
1:09:55 What might you put on that billboard?
1:09:58 I don’t know if I would take that opportunity.
1:09:59 Tell me why.
1:10:01 I don’t feel called to do that.
1:10:10 And I also don’t feel like we’re in a time where anything without context can be received
1:10:11 purely.
1:10:12 Tell me more about that.
1:10:15 This is a thread that I think I’m also pulling onto my own way.
1:10:19 So I want to hear more about what you mean by that.
1:10:26 Everything is received now based upon the context that we have defined within different
1:10:35 cultures and all of our culture of humanity and the stereotypes and the social cultural
1:10:41 practices and all of the ways we relate to each other and exist.
1:10:49 We have decided to go in the direction of believing that I can look at you or I can
1:10:54 hear something, a snippet of you fragment.
1:11:00 A fragment of Tim is all I need to understand.
1:11:06 And whereas there’s a proliferation of data and we’re more connected now than we’ve ever
1:11:12 been, but we’re more susceptible to deception as well.
1:11:18 And we would rather express and connect in those ways in lieu of going deeper.
1:11:26 And a billboard and media and all these expressions, which is why I love this because it allows
1:11:27 for that.
1:11:33 But all these other forms that we have propped up as primary separate us from depth.
1:11:34 Yeah.
1:11:38 It’s the surface level that doesn’t lead to the deeper levels.
1:11:43 It prevents us from getting to the deeper levels in a sense.
1:11:47 So you don’t want to traffic in that anymore in any way.
1:11:53 The reason I started this podcast 10 plus years ago now was to be able to get into the
1:11:59 deep water to have the space for that and to hopefully at the time I didn’t know, but
1:12:06 attract a listenership who also felt a thirst for the subtleties that you can only touch
1:12:12 upon and the holistic edges of a person or a topic that you can only get access to when
1:12:16 you have the space, when you have time.
1:12:20 So I resonate a lot with that.
1:12:24 Sometimes things take multiple listens, multiple exposure.
1:12:31 If you feel something from something, that’s your first signal, the emotional connection.
1:12:35 Something even if you don’t understand why, something relates to something you experienced
1:12:41 or something that you heard, you want your aspire to has been revealed as clues or tips
1:12:43 or some vision, right?
1:12:49 That’s how you know that there’s many, many, many more layers there for you.
1:12:50 Yeah, totally.
1:12:55 I was just thinking as you were saying that of this book that I’ve read so many times
1:12:57 called Awareness by Anthony D’Amelo.
1:13:01 I think the subtitle is the promises and perils of reality.
1:13:04 In any case, really fun book, very short.
1:13:11 And I’ve read it on Kindle, but I’ve also read it in paperback over and over again.
1:13:16 And what strikes is each time I read it because I have one copy with highlights over time,
1:13:21 I highlight different things whenever I go back because I am a different person in a
1:13:27 different situation or a developing person in different circumstances with different
1:13:30 feelings about things.
1:13:36 And it’s just remarkable how each pass reads like a new book almost.
1:13:42 This is the thing that I’ve been thinking about for years, this idea that as people,
1:13:47 whether creative or not, but it applies to the creative, obviously.
1:13:55 We only have two, maybe three ideas in life.
1:14:07 We have two ideas that we are constantly refining, recreating, presenting, refining, recreating,
1:14:13 presenting, and it’s your life’s idea set.
1:14:20 Then, if that’s the case, how much, and I ask you this because I want to know if you
1:14:25 made a list of the five books or the five things or five places, because I love your
1:14:26 list.
1:14:28 This inspired me.
1:14:34 What are the five things that you know you could possess in this lifetime if you had to
1:14:41 wipe everything else away and the only knowledge and the only inspiration, only experience,
1:14:47 the only everything that you could draw from were of this five?
1:14:53 Because I’m reaching a point where that’s almost something that I’m willing to live
1:14:54 by.
1:15:04 Instead of the pursuit of more knowledge, more understanding, more broad vision and connectivity,
1:15:12 how do I go as deep as I can within a handful of things that are for me and leave the rest?
1:15:13 Yeah.
1:15:14 Which is a radical …
1:15:15 Yeah.
1:15:16 Yeah.
1:15:21 So, for you, if you were to play that game, what are the five things?
1:15:25 Maybe you should have a podcast, maybe that’s your next thing.
1:15:26 Man.
1:15:29 I will give it a shot and then I want to ask you the same thing because what’s a cool
1:15:37 twist on the question is it’s not just books, documentaries, people, but experiences or
1:15:42 beliefs that could be in the list, then it gets really interesting.
1:15:43 It’s …
1:15:44 Right?
1:15:45 Yes.
1:15:47 It gets interesting because you can’t outsource it.
1:15:48 No.
1:15:49 Now you have to own it.
1:15:53 So, for me, I was thinking as you were talking, this is rough draft, right?
1:15:54 Yeah.
1:15:55 Of course.
1:15:56 I totally get it.
1:15:57 This is rough draft.
1:15:58 It’s changing every other day.
1:16:03 It might be a lot of red ink at some point, but what comes to mind for me was, number one,
1:16:04 everything’s going to be okay.
1:16:08 I think from a very young age, I’ve just been hyper-vigilant, had a lot of bad things happen
1:16:09 to me as a kid.
1:16:13 So, my system has always been oriented towards things are not okay and they’re not going
1:16:14 to be okay.
1:16:19 You have to be constantly scanning your environment, scanning people for threats, et cetera.
1:16:22 So, number one would just be everything’s going to be okay.
1:16:26 Number two would be, it’s all about relationships.
1:16:28 The relationships are what matter, friends, family.
1:16:29 That’s it.
1:16:30 That’s it.
1:16:34 And also your relationship with yourself, but honestly, I feel like I best develop myself
1:16:35 in relationship.
1:16:42 So, I pay attention to the question of, do I like the version of myself that I am when
1:16:43 I’m with this person?
1:16:46 So, the relationships being everything.
1:16:50 Number three, this one, we could dig into it if we want, but I would say death isn’t
1:16:52 the end, so don’t be afraid of it.
1:16:57 That might require some explanation, but I would say, don’t spend your whole life afraid
1:16:58 of death.
1:17:01 That would be number three.
1:17:03 That one, it got a lot of meat on the bone.
1:17:06 Yeah, there’s a lot of meat on the bone there.
1:17:13 And I would say, honestly, those are the top three that immediately come to mind.
1:17:19 What I might say is for me personally, don’t be afraid of your sensitivity.
1:17:20 It can be hard, but it’s a gift.
1:17:24 The instrumentation, like my sight, my hearing, it’s all very, very, very sensitive.
1:17:27 So being in a place like New York City can be completely overwhelming.
1:17:30 Being at a dinner party with eight people can be really overwhelming.
1:17:36 So interestingly, so I very rarely go to concerts, but when I attended your event, it resonated
1:17:42 differently because it wasn’t unidirectional.
1:17:48 It was not the stage on the stage or the performer on the stage inflicting sound on the audience.
1:17:55 It was a collective experiment, and there was a lot of emergent participation and interaction
1:17:59 which changed how my senses metabolized the whole thing, which is very interesting.
1:18:00 Wow.
1:18:06 So I didn’t feel any overwhelm at all at that event, but on a pure decibel level, it wasn’t
1:18:07 overwhelming.
1:18:08 But you’re in a concert, right?
1:18:10 And it’s a cozy venue.
1:18:12 You feel it.
1:18:16 So I would probably talk to myself about the sensitivity because I’ve viewed it as a liability
1:18:19 for a long time, but I think there are different ways to frame it.
1:18:21 That’s what comes to mind for me.
1:18:23 What about for you?
1:18:24 Man.
1:18:25 Wow.
1:18:26 You mind?
1:18:28 I could play my answer.
1:18:29 Yeah.
1:18:30 Let’s do that.
1:18:36 Because it’s in abstract form, but rapidly approaching clarity.
1:18:37 Let’s do it.
1:18:38 Yeah.
1:18:39 Absolutely.
1:18:40 100%.
1:18:41 Where are we going to do that?
1:18:42 Over here?
1:18:43 I mean, is that okay if we go?
1:18:44 Yeah.
1:18:45 We got the lav mics on.
1:18:46 We can just wander over.
1:18:47 Oh, we don’t need.
1:18:48 Okay.
1:18:49 Yeah.
1:18:50 Yeah.
1:18:51 Let’s give it a shot.
1:18:52 I’m excited about this.
1:19:09 Let’s see.
1:19:10 So see.
1:19:11 Oh.
1:19:29 I do these concerts without, I call them streams.
1:19:37 It’s like stream of consciousness, completely improvised, spontaneous composition.
1:19:38 Right?
1:19:40 Right at the piano.
1:19:48 And without any sheet music or any preparation, I will play 90 minutes, two hours.
1:19:58 And it really invites the audience to feel this wave, it’s akin to a collective chant.
1:20:05 And we’re, we’re in spaces that we’re discovering together.
1:20:11 So when I was saying, I wanted to answer at the piano, I was just going to stream for
1:20:24 a minute.
1:20:42 Okay., so we’re going to play 90 minutes.
1:21:08 Okay., so we’re going to play 90 minutes.
1:21:35 Okay., so we’re going to play 90 minutes.
1:21:57 Okay, so we’re going to play 90 minutes.
1:22:24 Thank you for that.
1:22:25 Thank you.
1:22:27 That’s beautiful, man.
1:22:28 Beautiful to be with you.
1:22:29 Yeah.
1:22:30 Likewise.
1:22:31 Yeah.
1:22:32 I like your answer.
1:22:33 Yeah.
1:22:36 So what does that feel like to you, to do that?
1:22:39 What is the felt sense?
1:22:50 Feels like you are traveling, you’re moving, and your hand is telling you, this is what
1:22:55 I want to play.
1:23:03 And as you play it, you’re seeing all of the colors and you’re hearing the sound and it
1:23:10 starts to tell you, I want to go here.
1:23:22 And then it sometimes is telling you things that you don’t know, you’re not familiar,
1:23:23 but it’s going to anyway.
1:23:29 And that’s the biggest difference because it’s telling you something, you haven’t practiced,
1:23:38 you don’t know if you can actually play, you don’t know if you actually will make it.
1:23:41 Why do you think it takes you there?
1:23:49 It’s the truest expression, the moment calls for what it calls for, and you can’t really
1:23:54 dictate what the moment calls for based on your preparation.
1:23:56 Yeah, or your preference.
1:24:06 Your preference is, because it’s your preference is probably not true.
1:24:10 Yeah, that makes sense to me.
1:24:18 So it truly is music that is channeled from, it’s channeled to you for everyone in that
1:24:25 moment never to happen again.
1:24:31 Thank you so much.
1:24:32 Wow.
1:24:33 Yeah.
1:24:34 Yes, sir.
1:24:35 Yes, sir.
1:24:36 You know.
1:24:37 Yeah.
1:24:39 So glad we did this.
1:24:42 This is amazing, man, to have the piano here like this.
1:24:43 Oh, it’s beautiful.
1:24:44 I didn’t know you were going to have this.
1:24:45 I never have you done that.
1:24:48 I haven’t heard that before with the piano.
1:24:55 The only time we ever had a piano make a guest appearance very different was 2000, and we
1:25:07 got this right, 15, long time ago, I interviewed Jamie Fox at his house, and he got on the
1:25:08 piano for a second.
1:25:13 It was very short, but totally different context, totally different context.
1:25:18 Because there’s the instrument, then there’s the vessel, then there’s the communication
1:25:25 between the two, and that’s the one and only time that piano and my recollection has made
1:25:33 an appearance in 750 episodes, so this is a first.
1:25:37 Man, that’s amazing.
1:25:42 Yeah, it’s incredible.
1:25:46 I have to ask you, because number one, I’m excited about it, we can do it here, I don’t
1:25:49 need to sit down, but Beethoven Blues.
1:25:50 Oh, yeah!
1:25:51 Beethoven Blues.
1:25:52 Yeah!
1:25:53 Yeah, the blues!
1:25:54 I am excited about this.
1:25:56 Yes, it’s going to be amazing to share.
1:26:00 Especially after our conversation, even more so.
1:26:01 Wow.
1:26:02 Wow.
1:26:04 And after spending a little more time hanging out, it’s been a minute.
1:26:11 Because now I’m thinking about the music as something that I can ingest, something that
1:26:18 I can let feed me inspire in the sense of breathing in.
1:26:19 That’s right.
1:26:22 So could you say a bit more about how that came to be?
1:26:29 You know, the idea is something that I feel uniquely positioned to do is hearing Beethoven’s
1:26:35 music and not just playing it as it says on the score, but being in conversation with
1:26:37 Beethoven and extending his music.
1:26:44 So as we talked about, you know, the idea of streams, this sort of spontaneous composition,
1:26:53 if you were to take Beethoven’s music and exist within the music as if you were co-composing
1:27:04 it with him and adding all these elements that many of which, all of which existed after
1:27:06 his time on earth.
1:27:19 So you have things like Flamenco music or gospel music, soul music, jazz music and blues primarily,
1:27:31 which to me is the, not just musical innovation of the 20th century, but an innovation of
1:27:35 human expression and spirituality.
1:27:41 Could you say a little bit more about that because I listen to blues, but I want to understand
1:27:43 why you feel that way about it.
1:27:48 And it’s not that I disagree, but I want to understand the magnitude of what you’re
1:27:49 saying.
1:27:50 Yes, yes.
1:27:53 Blues is a form of music.
1:27:54 It’s also a form.
1:27:56 It’s a 12 bar form.
1:27:57 It’s a sound.
1:27:59 It’s a style.
1:28:01 It’s an inflection.
1:28:04 You can sound like the blues without playing the blues.
1:28:15 If you moan or you cry, the instrument wails.
1:28:23 That idea is something that is about our existence in the human condition and the blues is an
1:28:27 allegory for the human condition in sound.
1:28:34 It’s a musical allegory that exists within the context of a cultural movement.
1:28:39 So that’s something that has not happened and has existed before it had a name.
1:28:48 So for you to find things like that in the world that are foundational to our existence
1:28:54 and then to figure out how do I name them and identify them so then they can be shared
1:29:02 and then furthermore, how do you create a whole system that not only becomes its own
1:29:09 form of musical engagement, social, cultural engagement, their dances, their blues rituals,
1:29:14 juke joints, stomps, boogie woogie, all this that we’ve grown accustomed to.
1:29:22 Now I can also implement that into other spaces of music which becomes this democratic expression
1:29:24 of humanity.
1:29:30 So what I started to think about with the blues is there are forms of music that express
1:29:38 that aspect of the human condition and that pathos but didn’t have all of the language
1:29:45 that we have to acutely express it and also include the range of cultural diasporic reality
1:29:48 that has existed since.
1:29:58 So now we can take that and inject these other forms of music, these other expressions with
1:30:04 something that’s so profound and so deep and so rooted, so human.
1:30:11 It’s an opportunity of a lifetime for an artist and the blues provides that.
1:30:13 Not a one other thing in the technical realm.
1:30:16 The blues is simple and it’s complex.
1:30:20 The blues is generally three chords but you don’t always have to be playing those three
1:30:23 chords to be playing the blues.
1:30:26 It’s spiritual but it’s also very much scientific.
1:30:34 So if you take these five notes, that’s the pentatonic scale.
1:30:35 That’s the sound of the blues.
1:30:43 The pentatonic scale though, in this form, has existed in music since the beginning.
1:30:49 Gregorian chants, indigenous folk music, music of drum circles in West Africa, in Ghana.
1:30:52 All the different sounds of Appalachia.
1:30:59 Modern music, you’ve heard the sound.
1:31:04 You hear this sound in every culture since the beginning.
1:31:13 Now if you add that note, that’s what we call the blues scale.
1:31:17 The blues is in the sound of the pentatonic scale.
1:31:22 That in and of itself has a perfect symmetry.
1:31:33 The blue note is the expression that our early ancestors in this country created to add the
1:31:38 sense of the American experience to this scale.
1:31:40 It’s more than the scale.
1:31:47 They added this to exemplify the specificity of America and the experience of American
1:31:50 life.
1:31:54 And all different ways you can play the blues, even without playing the scale, because the
1:32:01 thing about the blues, inflection, is that if you can capture that blues inflection,
1:32:03 you can find melodies that have the blues.
1:32:07 You can find voices that have the blues.
1:32:11 You can find rhythms that have the blues, mainly the shuffle rhythm, which is something
1:32:18 that came from Africa and is the marriage of six, eight over two, a two beat and a three
1:32:20 beat combined at the same time.
1:32:23 And that evolved into the American shuffle rhythm.
1:32:30 So all of these things are so interconnected and so sophisticated, so intricate.
1:32:37 And the blues, after all that, you can sit on a porch or a ballroom or a juke joint and
1:32:39 anybody can sing it.
1:32:45 And it’s always two verses in an answer.
1:32:46 The thrill is gone.
1:32:49 The thrill is gone away.
1:32:50 The thrill is gone.
1:32:54 The thrill is gone away.
1:32:55 Finish it for me.
1:32:56 No, no, no.
1:32:57 I’m just saying.
1:32:58 Yeah, yeah.
1:32:59 It’s simple.
1:33:00 It was codified.
1:33:01 Mm-hmm.
1:33:06 Yeah, the architecture, like the basic undergirding sort of eye beams of the architecture are
1:33:12 quite simple, but the way that it can be applied is just beyond counting, right?
1:33:19 It’s the thing that existed in the air and the thing that we’ve all felt within.
1:33:24 And it took this American experiment for it to emerge into a form.
1:33:25 Yeah.
1:33:26 That makes sense.
1:33:31 And I mean, it’s a combination of, like, discovering fire, this thing that has always
1:33:35 been there, that we now have a form for.
1:33:40 And it’s also something very elemental that can be wielded in a million different ways.
1:33:44 And as you have different cultural influences, you have different combinations of people,
1:33:48 newer and newer and newer ways of applying it emerge.
1:33:54 We’ve heard it in rock and roll baselines our whole life, the old.
1:34:00 Just thinking about all of the ways that I’ve heard the blues before even really understanding
1:34:02 that is so ubiquitous.
1:34:03 You know what I mean?
1:34:10 I’m thinking, we’re here in Jimmy Hendry’s studio.
1:34:11 That’s the pentatonic scale.
1:34:18 There’s just so much that you would, you can listen to so much and understand it.
1:34:38 So when I took Beethoven, I was thinking, you know, if you put that on it.
1:34:53 In the congo, one, two, three, one, two.
1:35:19 So, you know what I mean?
1:35:20 I do.
1:35:33 I find the blues as a.
1:35:37 My dad used to play that song on the piano when I was a kid.
1:35:45 That specific segment just activated like ratatouille style, an Anton ego flashes back to being a
1:35:46 kid.
1:35:47 That was wild.
1:35:48 It’s incredible what music does.
1:35:54 And I’m not a musician, but it’s so igniting to use that word.
1:35:59 It’s just an incredible key that unlocks.
1:36:04 These songs too are so deeply connected to us.
1:36:05 Beethoven wrote songs.
1:36:08 We’re listening to these compositions, these melodies, themes, all these things we’ve heard
1:36:11 for years and years over generations.
1:36:17 So it ignites people’s love, not just for music, but brings them back to moments in their
1:36:19 life, experiences in their life.
1:36:25 And that’s what this album, this music is generally about the concept of Beethoven blues,
1:36:31 but also about the humanity that it will bring people together, bring somebody back to the
1:36:36 instrument who stepped away for many years, a kid to a growing up who maybe I don’t see
1:36:44 myself in classical music, but now I see, oh, there’s a, I see something that was always
1:36:47 there like the blues can bring it out.
1:36:51 But it just hadn’t been presented to me in that way.
1:36:57 And I mean, what comes to mind as an image for me also is you have these various tributaries
1:37:03 of music that have in some ways separated out of mushroom using the right geological
1:37:08 term here, but they’ve sort of separated and flowed out into different fingers.
1:37:13 And what you seem to have done starting, maybe not starting, but certainly at Juilliard,
1:37:18 especially afterwards, you’ve sort of brought these flows back together in a way that they
1:37:24 can intermingle, which gives people permission to remix, to make something that is uniquely
1:37:25 theirs.
1:37:26 To live, baby.
1:37:27 To live.
1:37:28 That’s it.
1:37:29 That’s it.
1:37:30 That’s it.
1:37:31 That’s it.
1:37:32 That’s it.
1:37:36 It’s not just the music, it’s not about the music.
1:37:39 It’s about the music and more.
1:37:44 Wow, he played that.
1:37:51 I like doing this, these harmonies, like imagine if you, there’s a version on the album that
1:37:58 goes for 20 minutes and it makes this into a, it’s this healing trance.
1:37:59 It’s like a meditation.
1:38:00 .
1:38:02 .
1:38:05 .
1:38:09 .
1:38:14 .
1:38:19 .
1:38:22 [inaudible]
1:38:25 (soft piano music)
1:38:28 (soft piano music)
1:38:38 (soft piano music)
1:38:44 (soft piano music)
1:38:48 (soft piano music)
1:38:53 (soft piano music)
1:38:58 (soft piano music)
1:39:03 (soft piano music)
1:39:08 (soft piano music)
1:39:10 (soft piano music)
1:39:12 – I’m just gonna put this album on repeat
1:39:14 and listen to it a thousand times.
1:39:15 – Oh man.
1:39:19 – I mean, 20 minutes of that, I mean,
1:39:25 that feels like taking the hypotenuse to catharsis.
1:39:30 – Yes.
1:39:32 – That’s it. That’s the idea.
1:39:34 – Yeah. Wow.
1:39:38 I feel very privileged to even watch you do that.
1:39:39 – Brother, thank you.
1:39:43 I’m grateful for you building this space
1:39:47 and allowing for folks to come in and share who they are
1:39:49 and what they have to offer.
1:39:53 And then it becoming this feedback loop of us all growing.
1:39:54 – Yeah.
1:39:57 – Of us all learning and growing together.
1:39:58 That’s you, man.
1:39:59 Thank you for that.
1:40:00 – Thanks, brother.
1:40:01 – That’s powerful stuff.
1:40:02 – Thank you. I love doing it.
1:40:04 How did this end up being a job?
1:40:05 Crazy.
1:40:06 – Hey, man.
1:40:07 – Man.
1:40:08 – Blessing of life, right?
1:40:10 – JohnVatisse. JohnVatisse.com.
1:40:12 Beethoven Blues. Go get it, everybody.
1:40:15 – Hey, guys. This is Tim again.
1:40:17 Just one more thing before you take off,
1:40:19 and that is Five Bullet Friday.
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