SwayBlog

While Jon Batiste's music is typically categorized as jazz, it's actually not so easy to pigeonhole, given his tendency to blend influences from multiple genres. That, he explained in an interview with Atwood Magazine, is entirely by design. "I think a lot of the music that we make fits into genres, and I wanted to make music that was not going based on that system," he said of his 2019 album "We Are," which he characterized as "a representation of genreless music" that's "not trying to fit into any box or anything like that."

That philosophy is one that typifies his hometown of New Orleans, he told Entertainment Weekly, where a unique form of music evolved over time from "this blend of Afro Caribbean sounds, and the sounds of the enslaved people, and Irish Celtic music, and French sounds and instruments."

As a result, Batiste added, mixing varied genres ranging from hip-hop to B&B into a musical melting pot was something that "felt really, really natural." The key, he divulged, lay in an artist finding his or her musical voice, which then allows the freedom to experiment within it. "You can play a song in a style people have never heard from you before — it could be dubstep, EDM — and it'll sound like you because you found this center of yourself, and it is a core that doesn't change," he said. 

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