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Jon Batiste on Being a Dual Grammys and Oscars Contender — Again! — and the Marital Lullabies That Clicked With Both Academies
Jon Batiste talks about what's clicked with both the Grammys and the Oscars, as he's up for six of the former and has a best song nom for the latter.
As far as the March 10 Oscar ceremony, Batiste is represented with a best original song nomination for “It Never Went Away” from his documentary “ American Symphony,” a film largely dedicated to his wife, author Suleika Jaouad, their journey from childhood friendship to marriage, and her wrenching health issues including leukemia. While he’s never needed the validation of awards, it’s curious to wonder if the success of “We Are” and its sonic universality — after recordings like the grooving gumbo soul of 2005’s “Times in New Orleans,” the free jazz of 2014’s “The Process” with Chad Smith and Bill Laswell and his meditations on the compositions of John Lewis and Thelonious Monk — didn’t open the doors to the multi-flavored “World Music Radio.” Considering the intimacy of both “Butterfly” and “It Never Went Away,” ballads that speak, respectively, to the fragility of existence and the ways that love surely outlasts mortality, it’s curious that Batiste would entrust elements of his marriage and storytelling to another writer, longtime hitmaker Dan Wilson (Semisonic, Mitski, Taylor Swift, Dixie Chicks).
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