With so many ways to communicate at our disposal, we must not forget the transformative power of a live music experience and genuine human exchange.

Jon Batiste

Categorized in : Forget Power Music Experience

In a live performance, it's a collaboration with the audience; you ride the ebb and flow of the crowd's energy. On television, you don't have that.

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The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.

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Technology is something you have to embrace because technology is part of our generation. Digital natives, for instance, are people who grew up in a world that always had the Internet and who always had smartphones. Millennials aren't too far behind: my generation of people, who were in the mix of the Internet when it first came out.

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I'm from New Orleans, which is all about direct engagement out in the street with all the parades and Mardi Gras Indians and jazz funerals. I'm trying to take that and put it into my generation, a group that doesn't have enough joy and celebration in their lives.

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The Batiste family is a large musical family in Louisiana, out in New Orleans. People go to New Orleans, and if they go to any club, four days out of the week I guarantee you that you will find a Batiste playing in the ensemble.

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Whatever I do with music, I try to make it align deeply with the values and principles of who I am and what I believe the purpose of my life is.

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I think it's important for people to stay human and remember that genuine human connection is more fulfilling than anything that technology has to offer. We all have it within us, and music is something that can bring that out of us.

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The music is really about sharing an experience. That's why we call it Stay Human. It's like we're sharing this genuine human exchange.

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Earliest musical memory is probably being scared stiff with my family's band as a youngster on stage playing the conga drums.

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I'm from Kenner, Louisiana, where music is played for every occasion in life. There's music for being born, there's music for dying... It's just natural. Families get really good because they play a lot together.

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Imagine if you grew up in a place where your lineage was there for a hundred years, and part of the culture was to play music 50 percent of the time. You'd probably have a lot of musicians in your family too.

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I have seven uncles, and my dad played bass, they had a band together, that was the family band. And of course as the cousins got older, including myself, we joined a family band. All the cousins played. That's my heritage.

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I was raised in the Catholic Church, and for me, the thought in the Bible and Christianity, and the spirit within that, is one of the guiding principles in my life.

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Early American music and early folk music, before the record became popular and before there were pop stars and before there were venues made to present music where people bought tickets, people played music in the community, and it was much more part of a fabric of everyday life. I call that music 'root music.'

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There's a tradition - in New Orleans it still exists - where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.

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We played Carnegie Hall, and that was one time where I felt... Carnegie Hall as a legendary, very venerable place to perform. I'd never heard of anyone going into the Hall and kind of standing on the seats and playing throughout the aisles and having the audience stand on the seats. So when we did that in 2013, even for me it was a shock.

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You can't hate the person next to you when you're laughing and dancing together.

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There were so many people after that first 'Colbert Report' interview that were impressed by the synergy we had during the interview. People everywhere we'd go would say, 'You should be the bandleader; it would be great for jazz. It would be great for the music.' But I was completely against it.

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It's not like the old competition that you had between Leno and Letterman. It's a friendly competition between Fallon and Stephen.

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My whole way of looking at entertainment and audience engagement - and my ability to go from one genre to another - comes from my experience in New Orleans.

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