United States Various: Jon Batiste (piano, melodica), members of Stay Human, San Francisco Symphony / Jonathan Taylor-Rush (conductor). Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 12.12.2025. (HS)
Performance and improvisations: works by Beethoven, Jon Batiste, Bill Withers, Scott Joplin, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers, et al.
The intersection of musical genres has long fascinated me. Some of the most rewarding concerts I have attended have featured virtuosic polymaths from jazz, blues, bluegrass, Latin American music and the amazing tabla genius, Zakir Hussain. Classical music has historically benefited from composers and performers who can absorb elements of folk music (Dvořák, anyone?) and jazz (Gershwin).
Jon Batiste is another thing altogether. New Orleans-born, Juilliard-trained, he is an amazingly adept pianist who can riff endlessly on anything from Beethoven to blues. His own compositions range from pop hits to his kaleidoscopic American Symphony, written for a performance in Carnegie Hall in 2022, and he has a shelf full of Grammy awards. His much-anticipated appearance with the San Francisco Symphony promised to be exciting: his 2024 album, Beethoven Blues, explored the music of Beethoven through the lens of a jazz pianist, and his symphony proved he can find fascinating uses for a classical orchestra’s resources.
The evening started big, with the opening movement of his symphony that develops into an all-encompassing commentary on the nation’s beauty along with scarier aspects of American history. Conductor Jonathan Taylor-Rush, who has conducted big orchestras for Batiste on a number of occasions, got the most out of the thumping rhythms and Duke Ellington-like eruptions from the orchestra’s brass and woodwind sections. It reached a towering climax before he caressed the signature theme on the piano.
The orchestra sat unused, however, for too much of the two-hour concert. Full orchestras have to sit quietly as featured soloists play encores, and that is how they spent much of this evening. Though the arrangements of pop and American songbook material didn’t make much use of the swirling colors of the symphony, the string section found some surprisingly soulful, flowing work in Bill Withers’s ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’.
The focus, instead, was on Batiste’s jazzman’s knack of finding connections among apparently unrelated examples of familiar music. That is about the only theme I could discern in a program that was supposed to be announced from the stage, but wasn’t. As if to apologize for the haphazard program, Batiste confided to the audience, ‘We put this show together a few hours ago’, adding, ‘That’s not typical for this format’.
Batiste’s longtime fans responded enthusiastically when, often leaning back and smiling like a latter-day Stevie Wonder, he played such hits as ‘Für Elise’ and ‘Moonlight Sonata’ from the Beethoven Blues album. These two examples elaborated exuberantly on Beethoven’s simplicity with eye-opening blues and jazz riffs. The audience also joined in on his big pop hits ‘Cry’, ‘FREEDOM’ and ‘Big Money’.
On the other hand, not defining what to expect next forced the audience to just soak up the music. It reminded me of cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s ongoing project of mixing brief new music by contemporary composers with Bach’s cello suites. She chooses not to tell us what’s coming next either, asking her audience to simply let the music speak. There was, Batiste added at another point, a point to his cross-genre mix: ‘We play all the different types of music for an allegory of how we can all be together’. A good sentiment for this holiday season’s dangerous atmosphere.
There were more than a few nods to the Christmas season. One solo piano medley pepped up the Scott Joplin rag ‘The Entertainer’ and moved seamlessly into a deftly swinging version of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’.
Providing jazz and pop support were five longtime members of his Stay Human band (which accompanied him for several years on Stephen Colbert’s late-night television show), including bassist Phil Kuehn, saxophonist Marcus Miller and drummer Joe Saylor. Saylor opened the second set with a Gospel beat on tambourine as Batiste, alone on melodica, delivered a righteous ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, which somehow made sense when it segued into ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. Another surprisingly good fit paired Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’ in a style that acknowledged Ray Charles’s iconic version, and a tribute to Louis Armstrong in ‘What a Wonderful World’. They glowed with sincerity.
For an encore, after the orchestra awkwardly filed off the stage, Batiste, again on melodica, turned to Rogers’s ‘Favorite Things’ – another song associated with Christmas – its original 3/4 rhythm converted a syncopated 4/4 lilt. It is not surprising for an artist steeped in jazz to rethink how such familiar music should go: one of John Coltrane’s most recognizable works was an extensive jazz waltz version that exploded into complex soloing. This variation didn’t stop there: it eventually got around to Ellington’s ‘Caravan’ (the connection being that it was in the same minor mode) and ended in an extensive drum duet in which Batiste and Saylor shared rhythms on the same percussion set.
Was the evening exciting? Yes, at times, even though it did not all fit together as smoothly as it might have.
Harvey Steiman
Featured Image: Pianist-composer Jon Batiste with the San Francisco Symphony and Stay Human © Kristen Loken