Jon Batiste’s Call and Response at NYC’s Beacon
In Winging It, I quote New Orleanian Jon Batiste’s reflections on the central role of “call and response” in the arts (and in comic improv’s “Yes, and…”). In speaking with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Jon remarked of a Bach Two-Part Invention:
“But it’s just two voices. You see … the simplicity of how he makes something that is just two melodies playing in conversation, asking questions, responding, sometimes they’re talking at the same time. Other times, it’s call and response. Sometimes it’s in harmony. Sometimes there’s dissonance. Just … that’s life. That’s our journey exemplified in a simple piece that he wrote for his kids. That’s amazing.”
Jon summed up simply: “That’s life…. That’s our journey.” There is something fundamental in call and response, the taproot of innovation. Innovation comes in response to some need. According to New Orleans saxophonist Sidney Bechet, it is born from a journey the enslaved make to “a place where they all used to be happy once.” Yes, and … builds or re-builds community. It gives voice to both our individuality and our shared humanity.
Syncopation, so central to New Orleans music from jazz to funk, is double-voiced, a matter of call and response. During his Harvard lectures on “Music as Metaphor,” Wynton Marsalis defines syncopation as “accenting off the beat and coming back at unexpected times. It’s like you offer someone something and then when they reach for it, you snatch it back. Syncopation is playing a rhythm on the opposite side of the beat.” Warming to his theme, Marsalis continues:
“That’s exactly what Jonas Salk was talking about when he said giving you a virus could keep you from getting it. It’s what Mark Twain did in Huckleberry Finn when he used Huck’s embarrassment in having shown humanity to the n****r Jim, a man who we know is less than human, to elicit the opposite reaction in his reader. Syncopation is the daring application of dexterity, jocularity and timing to challenge the common grid, the common way of doing things the accepted way. It is the masterful challenging of convention, the element of surprise that makes a punch line funny.”
Decorous drumming, staying on the beat—the 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 metronome of military marches—is based on the rule book. Syncopation signifies—this is Henry Louis Gates’s term—on the decorous norm. It says, the dominant, mainstream culture thinks this is the real and true; I say, no, it’s this. To syncopate or to listen to syncopation is to “expect the unexpected.” Slopping it up, improv disrupts. It gets you thinking, do things have to be the way we’ve always done it?
In March, Jon brought his amazing musical journey to NYC’s Beacon Theater. The concert seemed a conversation among all the music influences that swirl in that brilliant mind and heart. It seemed a conversation with his great New Orleans predecessor, founding director of Jazz at Lincoln Center who has done so much to bring jazz back into popular culture. Wynton succeeded enough that he’s a household name. But Jon has made that crossover. Wynton has 12 Grammys. Almost half his age, with five Grammys, Jon is catching up.
Jon and Wynton both attended the famed preprofessional arts training high school New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA). NOCCA graduated musicians Harry Connick Jr., Donald Harrison, Terence Blanchard, and actor Wendell Pierce, as well as the other musical Marsalis brothers, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason.
Wynton got his academic training from the magnet school Ben Franklin (my alma mater), Jon from the famed St. Augustine High School. To a New Orleans ear (like mine), in this drum moment at the Beacon, with double-kit drummers to left and right, Jon is channeling his alma mater’s marching band, the St. Aug Marching 100s. Jon featured the drum-heavy “purple and gold” Marching 100s in his Grammy-award winning “Freedom” and “We Are.” To New Orleanians’ delight he featured them on stage last year at Jazz Fest, bringing many of us to tears. “Call and response” can do that, yes it can. It builds community.
Here’s hoping Jon brings the Marching 100 again this year when he closes out this Friday’s Jazz Fest on April 26.
