‘American Symphony’: Jon Batiste Gave Us the Best Music Doc of the Year
ON NOV. 21, 2021, Jon Batiste found out that he had been nominated for 11 Grammys, ranging from Best Contemporary Classical Composition to Best Improvised Jazz Solo; his most recent work, the roots-to-R&B melting pot We Are, was up for the Best Album of the Year award. He was six years into his tenure as the bandleader for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, his musical collective Stay Human was gigging and touring on the regular, and he’d won an Oscar for co-writing the score for the Pixar movie Soul. The New Orleans native was on a roll. But Batiste had one more thing he wanted to do. Or rather, that he needed to do.
Batiste had been conceptualizing the idea of an extended piece based on the idea of: What would a symphony orchestra sound like if you created one specifically for the here and now? There would be classically trained players, of course; you wouldn’t chuck centuries of musical history out the window. But you wouldn’t be beholden to the Eurocentric masters’ work, either. You could include avant-garde musicians, jazz musicians, folk musicians, Indigenous musicians. It would be a homegrown orchestra representative of an ideal United States, playing a work that spoke to our nation’s formative, flawed grand experiment. But rather than turn a critical eye to the country, it would celebrate an aspirational landscape where, per Batiste, “we should coexist if we lived up to the things we say we’re about.” It was scheduled to be performed once, for one night only, at Carnegie Hall. He called the piece American Symphony.
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This is what filmmaker Matthew Heineman signed up to chronicle. Having worked with Batiste before, when the musician had scored his portrait of the early days of Covid The First Wave, he heard about this work in progress over a casual dinner. Heineman had made his name as a young documentarian unafraid to embed himself in geopolitical hot spots and/or tread heavily through dangerous journalistic territory, cameras a-runnin’; a partial list of subjects would include Mexican drug syndicates (Cartel Land), anti-ISIS activists (City of Ghosts), and the final days of American troops in Afghanistan (Retrograde). The idea of tagging along with the composer as he traveled through the country, collecting sounds and collaborators along the way, seemed like a nice counterpart to his usual hopscotching through minefields.
American Symphony, the documentary that takes its name from Batiste’s magnum opus, quickly establishes that this is the path it plans on going down. And in an alternate universe, Heineman emerges at the end of their journey with a lovely behind-the-scenes time capsule — a sort of cinematic victory lap for Batiste as he attempts to carve a space in the lily-white composers’ canon. We get concise montages of the NOLA native’s rise from Juilliard misfit to omnipresent NYC busker to Late Show bandleader. We see him talking his way through ideas and fleshing out riffs and motifs on his piano, waxing philosophical about the expectations (and ceilings) put upon Black creatives. And we see him sledding down snowy hills with his wife, the musician and artist Suleika Jaouad, who offhandedly reminds her partner that “you can’t hit me with snowballs, I have leukemia.”
No one could accuse the film of burying the lede, but what it hasn’t disclosed yet is that when Jaouad was 22, she was diagnosed with bone cancer and went through extensive, often agonizing treatments to fight it for three and a half years. She wrote a New York Times column about her experience, as well as a book (Between Two Kingdoms), and did speaking engagements in which she spoke about the need for resilience in the face of adversity. And on Nov. 21, 2021, the same day that the Grammy nominations were announced, Jaouad had been informed that her cancer had returned after nearly a decade of remission and she’d need another bone marrow transplant. Unsurprisingly, she told Batiste to keep soldiering on and to finish the symphony once she started treatments again. Surprisingly, they both told Heineman to keep filming.And it’s once American Symphony begins harmonizing these highs and lows, adding minor-key grace notes to its major-chord melody voicings, that it not only finds its voice but begins to transcend being “just” a making-of doc. What Batiste is creating remains a huge part of the process, with numerous sequences devoted to him walking folks through interludes and choruses, working with a conductor, playing gigs on the road and, thanks to some surreptitious camera work on Heineman’s part, a you-are-there view of Batiste’s Grammys performance. But the film becomes less about one artist’s quest for glory and much, much more about two artists using creativity as a ballast, a bond, and a coping mechanism. He keeps composing. She keeps writing and sketching, even when chemo doubles her vision. The goal is to make it from one day to the next together.
And it’s once American Symphony begins harmonizing these highs and lows, adding minor-key grace notes to its major-chord melody voicings, that it not only finds its voice but begins to transcend being “just” a making-of doc. What Batiste is creating remains a huge part of the process, with numerous sequences devoted to him walking folks through interludes and choruses, working with a conductor, playing gigs on the road and, thanks to some surreptitious camera work on Heineman’s part, a you-are-there view of Batiste’s Grammys performance. But the film becomes less about one artist’s quest for glory and much, much more about two artists using creativity as a ballast, a bond, and a coping mechanism. He keeps composing. She keeps writing and sketching, even when chemo doubles her vision. The goal is to make it from one day to the next together.
American Symphony is screening on Netflix now.
David Fear is a Senior Editor and critic at Rolling Stone, and the former Film Editor of Time Out NY. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Esquire, Spin, NY Daily News, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Moviemaker, Nashville Weekly and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, as all writers must.