Multi-Grammy, Emmy, & Oscar winner Jon Batiste announces new solo piano album, Black Mozart (Batiste Piano Series Vol. 2)

Multi-Grammy, Emmy, & Oscar winner Jon Batiste announces new solo piano album, Black Mozart (Batiste Piano Series Vol. 2), out June 19 on Decca Records US

Two Thelonious Monk albums on Verve to follow on August 14

Multi-Grammy, Emmy, and Oscar winner Jon Batiste today announced his next three studio albums, starting with Black Mozart (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 2), out June 19 on Decca Records US. The release date intentionally lands on Juneteenth, underscoring the deeper cultural context of the album as Batiste reimagines the classical tradition through a Black American musical lens. Marking the second installment in Batiste’s solo piano series, the album continues to showcase the pianist’s engagement with transformative composers from multiple eras using elements of spontaneous composition and improvisation. An artist who “actively promotes the normalization of musical ambidexterity” (Downbeat), Batiste also announced today the upcoming release of Batiste Piano Series Volumes 3 and 4, focusing on Thelonious Monk: Monk Meditations and Monk Movements, both set for release on Verve Records on August 14. Batiste’s intent with the three albums was to “curate a musical conversation between Monk and Mozart with me at the piano, honoring them and contributing to their kindred legacies.” He continues:

“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a pioneer who created his own musical language yet honored his predecessors, a master of symmetry and refiner of structure and form, seamlessly combined extreme melodic simplicity with intense complexity that challenged the conventions of his time but still had a universal appeal. ... Like Thelonious Monk, for me a latter-day example of all the same qualities, Mozart was a meticulous metaphysician who created a special blend of logical mastery that still somehow defies explanation.”

Black Mozart preorders, singles, and streaming are available here, Monk Meditations here, and Monk Movements here. Links to the full series, including Beethoven Blues

Black Mozart - Born into a long line of Louisiana musicians, Batiste trained as a classical pianist and received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz piano from The Juilliard School. As the pianist told The New York Times in a profile of the first album in the series, 2024’s Beethoven Blues, his love of combining his own music with the classics dates back to his teenage years, when he would improvise on Chopin and Bach while performing in New Orleans. Batiste’s well-known transcending of genre definitions is a by-product of this musical omnivory, but even more importantly it simply reflects the pianist’s joyful engagement with all music, past and present, and his conviction that jazz music is a portal through which all music can be understood and can intercommunicate. The second volume of the Batiste Piano Series turns the spotlight on Mozart, an equally joyful and musically omnivorous soulmate who happened to live two and a half centuries earlier. Batiste elaborates:

“He ... absorbed everything that led to him and was the obvious successor of Johann Sebastian Bach. Both were keyboardists, supreme improvisers, providers of melody in all registers and purveyors of the percussive left hand. If Bach was a foundation, Mozart was a bridge that eventually led to the modern age. ... I reimagined Mozart ‘Black,’ imbuing it with influences from jazz, rags, stride, blues, and stomps but still maintaining its core essence of modern classical music.”