“It’s a Warning, Set to a Dance Beat”: Jon Batiste on His New Song 20 Years After Katrina

Many people know that Jon Batiste comes from a storied musical family in New Orleans—his uncle Lionel Batiste was a mainstay of The Treme Brass Band, and his cousin Russell Batiste, Jr was a celebrated jazz drummer—but Jon also comes from a family of activists. His mother’s father, David Gauthier, a leader of the Louisiana Postal Workers Union, supported the sanitation workers strike in 1968 that drew Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis, where King was assassinated. Among other causes, Jon has been active in the Black Lives Matter protests, a stance his mother saw as a continuation of her father’s legacy. Her dad “believed in standing up for what’s right,” said Katherine Batiste, “and that kind of rolled over on me some, and I passed it on to Jon.”

“I was raised by incredible people,” said Jon, who spent seven years as bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert up to 2022. “I saw my grandfather, I saw my father, I saw all these people who were in my immediate environment doing the work and not getting down about it. The key is to keep it going, not to look at yourself and pity the situation, but to find a way to do something with what you have and where you are.”

The “Petrichor” song illustrates the larger themes of his Big Money album, he added, because the pursuit of money at all costs is putting the climate at risk. And not only the climate. “We’re in the wealthiest time in human history,” he said. “There’s no shortage of resources. Yet there are [people] who don’t have clean water, clean food, basic healthcare. And it’s disproportionately affecting those in low-income communities, people of color. [When] the majority of the wealth is in the hands of only a small percentage of people, it will inevitably corrupt the policies that can change these things. That’s who the song is really geared toward. There’s a pollution blanket around the planet, but it’s the result of a pollution blanket around our souls.”

“It’s fitting that we’re here in this place of worship,” Batiste said about the setting of the interview—New York’s Middle Church, whose double-meaning motto is “Just Love”—because “as Pope Francis said, the Earth is our common home, a sacred planet, and [we need to live] up to our responsibility as stewards of the planet.”

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, the storm and the breach of protective levees put 80 percent of the city underwater, killed at least 1,800 people and drove countless others to leave town, never to return. While outsiders experienced the storm on television, as a media event, the Batiste family lived it. Jon, with his mother, father, sister, and grandmother, evacuated to Texas before the storm hit. But the family home where Katherine Batiste grew up, in the Carrolton neighborhood of New Orleans “was destroyed,” she said. “All my sisters, brothers, my family, their homes were destroyed… They lost everything… It was devastating.”

“New Orleans, to me, is the soul of America,” Jon Batiste said, adding that the city is “a warning” that climate-driven disasters “can happen anywhere, and there’s many places where this has happened.”

The role of the artist in the face of such danger and injustice is to “point people to the solutions with rhythm and poetry,” Batiste said. “It’s like [the jazz drummer] Art Blakey said, ‘music can wash away the dust of everyday life,’ and make somebody’s apathy turn into care into action. As an artist, you can connect right to the person–still also entertaining them, but uplifting them and their voice, so that then they know, ‘Oh, I have something to say, and it’s meaningful and it’s powerful. I’m going to sing it at the concert, and I’m going to leave here and it’s going to be in my heart, and I’m go into the voting booth and push it, I’m going to go into my communities and push it, and I’m going to live my life in ways that are aligned with it.’ And that is infectious. It moves to the next person, and the next person, the next person, and soon it’s our reality.”

Although the version of “Petrichor” on the Big Money album is a sort of talking blues foot tapper that lasts a 2 minutes and 38 seconds, the version Batiste and his band played a week earlier in New York’s Central Park was a raucous 11 minutes that had the standing-room crowd dancing with joy. Batiste, who just began a 50-date North American tour, said he plans to release a live album that will feature a similarly up-tempo version of “Petrichor” drawn from upcoming performances at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville and the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.

“It’s important when you’re changing the world to have a good time while you’re doing it,” he said. “I really want people to keep dancing and stay optimistic—but know that we gotta, we gotta, move.”