I

heard it.

Yeah, yeah, you know? I had to

hear it.

What you gonna do for us? Man, there's a tune, speaking of some of my early mentors, there's a left hand.

melody in the left hand and percussion.

Henry Butler.

You gonna play something else? Take us out of here, boss.

Yeah,

yeah.

Well, I've been thinking about Monk forever, but the piano and then Monk, I spent a year almost exclusively listening to The Loneliest Monk.

Like, I would listen to it every day, and I would listen to all of the things that I could find, whether it's documentaries, interviews.

I'd get bootleg back DVDs.

You know, when I was 19, I was first touring in Europe, and I'd find all of these, like, bootleg Denmark concert, 1966, The Loneliest Monk.

anything I could find.

You're thinking about these

It's a calling.

When I get to the piano, that's the openness.

It's a tidal wave.

I can express all of those things that are here and here and here.

So you're seeing the physical representation of that on my face, I guess, or my body.

You know, there's a change.

Everybody has

something that they're dealing with.

I'm just going to leave it there, but thank me later.

That's a great idea.

You know, I really, really love James Booker.

You know, the folks who know James Booker know he's a genius, but he's so unsung.

He's one of the greatest pianists, vocalists, and just song stylists.

that you've ever heard.

And he was from New Orleans and he died untimely and really kind of became an obscure figure outside of New Orleans and outside of, you know, music connoisseurs like ourselves.

All right.

He's really got such a beautiful melody here that is, is, is going to really connect to that gospel tradition, and it connects to the spirituals and the tradition of that music, as well as the blues.

This is Gospel Andante.

[piano music][piano music]

John Baptiste, I love you, brother.

Yes, sir.

Much love.

Rah! [piano music]

Whereas what you've done is shown that there is a direct link between Mozart and Thelonious Munch or Duke Ellington, that some of their compositions, if you break down those compositions, they're as towering as anything that Bach or Mozart ever did.

That's right on.

See, that's the thing.

What we call canon and what we call classical needs to constantly be reevaluated.

And we have to look at it and say, well, the black American classical music, gospel, jazz, soul, blues, and all the expressions that came after that, that's also not classical, that's canon.

That is a part of the greatness of human achievement and the lineage of human creativity.

So let's look at it and assess it and create things that bridge the two worlds, because they're actually not separate worlds.

What is your ideal sort of state of listening to music? Because you spend so much of your life creating it.

What do you mean by that?

The feeling of being a child and being alive, being in your body and being on the earth and moving around and thinking thoughts and realizing things for the first time and that innocence of all that is in Mozart's music.

It's in Mozart's sound.

It's in the essence of how his ideas evolve over the course of a composition.

It's in the way that his music is very singable, it's hummable.

It's something that immediately is embracing you, and that's a very childlike quality.

There's an innocence to it that almost defies your realizing how complex it is until you start to study it, until you start to take it apart and really understand.

What made you want to do that?

Mm

... beat of a drum, in the chord, a, a melody, a lyric, it just brings you to a realization of, wow, this is what we've been through.

This is where we're going.

This is who we are.

Like, all of that is translated.

It's the universal language, not just because you don't have to speak music to understand it and feel it, but it's universal in that it touches all of the universal human experience in one vibration.

That's what's powerful about music.

How did, how did you navigate that arriving there?

The eight-time Grammy Award winner tells St. Louis Public Radio why he's putting his own spin on the work of classical composers.

I really enjoyed making Beethoven Blues because he has so much pathos, so much of his personal pain in the music that there's so many emotions you can draw from to pull out the blues, that you could immediately feel it.

[playing piano] In the first few notes of Fur Elise, I was like, "Oh, that's pain.

That's lost love." [singing] That, that struck me immediately.

[playing piano] You know, I don't even believe in genre terminology to begin with, but I think that the idea of classical music now can extend.

What about Black American classical music like jazz and blues and R&B and funk? [laughs] Why is this music not classical? [playing piano] I think about Black Mozart, and I think about Beethoven, and I think about what they would have done with the color palette of Black American classical music.

What would they have done with those sounds and those conceptions? [playing piano] With Mozart, that is a different spirit.

What was it like for you to perform the national anthem in New Orleans at the Super Bowl in 2025?

[singing] Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave.

I love, love performing and the honor of being chosen to do it, not just for the Super Bowl, not just the national anthem, but in my hometown.

You know, I was there at the Superdome selling nacho cheese dip in ninth grade.

[laughs] And I was to go to the Superdome to, to perform.

Um, and really, an anthem to me is supposed to be a song, a, a theme, a tune that unites and brings people to a sense of pride about our collective identity.

And when that's in a place where there's misalignment and we don't see eye to eye about our identity and about the way that things surrounding our collective function, then I believe you should be in conversation with that theme, that tune, and reflect that in the tune.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Hands like mine, experiences like growing up in New Orleans and learning from the great Alvin Batiste and Ellis Marsalis, and studying the history of things that he wasn't around for.

I wondered what that would sound like if he was Black.

And not from the perspective of taking anything away, but we're continuing, we're adding to the continuum of human creativity.

Why two albums? One wasn't enough?

Thelonious Monk is my favorite pianist, my favorite in many ways.

He had a lot of philosophical things that he would say that really helped shape my understanding of, of music.

One of the things he would say all the time was, "The genius is the one that's most like themself."

moreOkay, got some hot water for tea

[laughs] We're going to see Ina.

I got my instrument.

[harmonica playing] And it's gonna be a beautiful day, and I'm very excited.

I'm very, very excited.

[harmonica playing] And I think we pulling up to the house right now.

Oh, Ina.

Oh.

[laughs]

I can express the depth of humanity of this individual in every choice that she makes, the integrity of every choice, the purity of the intention of every choice, and how it's never forsaking the path to true north of the first intention, the pure intention of the work.

It's never forsaking it for money, for fame, for any sort of accolade or trend that could come and just disrupt the signal.

It's the most pure intention of anyone that I've ever seen create, and I'm talking about from legendary people who I've been in the room with in any genre of creativity.

Then there's the craft.

Talk about the rigor of the craft, that it...

The toil of, of the craft that it takes to really know exactly what you're saying, exactly what you're doing, to know your stuff to the point where you just know it cold.

[laughs]

Yeah, it's in the hands of the creator.

The creator, the musician, the creator, the vision of the creative person can take a spoon, you know.

The spoons is an instrument down in Cajun country in Louisiana.

The washboard is an instrument.

We can create an instrument out of anything.

The bucket, you know, skiffle music.

You can create.

the large language learning model.

... um, in, in the school setting that we were in, but for, for future me, and that's gonna be my, my path forward.

Yeah, I remember the, the, the way that you, in that time, when we met, felt like the world was open.

It just- it was wide open.

It was...

You could feel that.

For me, I don't- I love the title of your book, because for me, it, it, it really resonates with coming out of my shell or, or not really having one moment, but a becoming.

Three suits, that's right.

I would take drawings to a tailor, and they would be like, "Well, we can't make this, but we can give you the textiles to, to make it." So then I would get...

As you'll hear, they use the line Martin wrote for Sinatra.

Ho, ho, ho.

Let's go.

Ho, ho, ho.

Let's go.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Let your heart be light.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

We are constantly warring with our, our nature.

So y- you, you, you have to think about the aspect of that, not just from a career perspective but from a spiritual one.

And then you have to think about, well, what is the work that only I can do? What is the work in the world that only I can do? And then let me do that to the best of my ability.

And what you'll see is there's a resonance in that, that, that makes whatever success, or lack thereof, in terms of the worldly standard that comes with that...... worth it? So then there's a level of fulfillment within while you balance this fight with the monster.

And then from there, I think it's a question of how much do you give? You know, Biblical principle is 10%.

But what- what is giving? How do you define that? And that's really the thing, and as you grow and as the goalposts move, and as things expand, and your- your- your vision of yourself and what you can contribute to the world, to the community that you're a part of, to society, all that expands, then how you give changes.

Mm-hmm.

You are related in big life.

Yes, we actually are.

We didn't know this for about five years, and we had been talking about everything.

So we got, got to know each other, then we found out we were cousins, and then h- throughout this conversation, he was telling me, you know, I just did Jay-Z's record.

At the time, he finished 444, and with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and, and, um, he was working on the Beyoncé album, and Cowboy Carter, and he was saying, "I wanna make different music than I've made before." And then I was in the process of thinking about what I wanted to do next, and it organically came together that when Beyoncé was finishing her album, we worked on that album together, and we started Big Money at the same time.

So it was kind of like we, we fell into working with each other after this whole series of events, and it led to the album.

This is before I knew that the album was gonna be a, a Americana album, for lack of a better term.

Of course.

I'm wondering if you can tell us about your audition to get into Juilliard.

Well, I had a real lineage of musicians, obviously, as we talked about, but in my immediate family, going to New York and living in New York, that hadn't happened.

So there were a few things that took an adjustment.

One was the snow.

I didn't have a winter coat, and the first time [laughs] I went to New York, it was snowing.

My audition was in the snowy morning after landing the night before from Louisiana, and it was the first audition of the year at Juilliard.

And, you know, people have so much pressure over these auditions because the acceptance rate is so low that you gotta come in and it feels like you're going to play a debut at the biggest moment of your life.

Why Forrest Gump?