[‘American Symphony’: The singer-musician-composer writes his
magnum opus while his wife battles cancer in a moving ode to love,
creativity, and the art of survival. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘AMERICAN SYMPHONY’: JON BATISTE GAVE US THE BEST MUSIC DOC OF
THE YEAR  
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David Fear
November 28, 2023
Rolling Stone
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_ ‘American Symphony’: The singer-musician-composer writes his
magnum opus while his wife battles cancer in a moving ode to love,
creativity, and the art of survival. _

"American Symphony", Netflix

 

ON NOV. 21, 2021, Jon Batiste
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out that he had been nominated for 11 Grammys, ranging from Best
Contemporary Classical Composition to Best Improvised Jazz Solo; his
most recent work, the roots-to-R&B melting pot _We Are,_ was up for
the Best Album of the Year award. He was six years into his tenure as
the bandleader for _The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
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musical collective Stay Human was gigging and touring on the regular,
and he’d won an Oscar for co-writing the score for the Pixar
movie _Soul_.
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New Orleans native was on a roll. But Batiste had one more thing he
wanted to do. Or rather, that he _needed_ to do.

Batiste had been conceptualizing the idea of an extended piece based
on the idea of: What would a symphony orchestra sound like if you
created one specifically for the here and now? There would be
classically trained players, of course; you wouldn’t chuck centuries
of musical history out the window. But you wouldn’t be beholden to
the Eurocentric masters’ work, either. You could include avant-garde
musicians, jazz musicians, folk musicians, Indigenous musicians. It
would be a homegrown orchestra representative of an ideal United
States, playing a work that spoke to our nation’s formative, flawed
grand experiment. But rather than turn a critical eye to the country,
it would celebrate an aspirational landscape where, per Batiste, “we
should coexist if we lived up to the things we say we’re about.”
It was scheduled to be performed once, for one night only, at Carnegie
Hall. He called the piece _American Symphony._
 

 

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This is what filmmaker Matthew Heineman
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chronicle. Having worked with Batiste before, when the musician had
scored his portrait of the early days of Covid _The First Wave,_ he
heard about this work in progress over a casual dinner. Heineman had
made his name as a young documentarian unafraid to embed himself in
geopolitical hot spots and/or tread heavily through dangerous
journalistic territory, cameras a-runnin’; a partial list of
subjects would include Mexican drug syndicates (_Cartel Land_),
anti-ISIS activists (_City of Ghosts_), and the final days of American
troops in Afghanistan (_Retrograde_). The idea of tagging along with
the composer as he traveled through the country, collecting sounds and
collaborators along the way, seemed like a nice counterpart to his
usual hopscotching through minefields.
 

_American Symphony,_ the documentary
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from Batiste’s magnum opus, quickly establishes that this is the
path it plans on going down. And in an alternate universe, Heineman
emerges at the end of their journey with a lovely behind-the-scenes
time capsule — a sort of cinematic victory lap for Batiste as he
attempts to carve a space in the lily-white composers’ canon. We get
concise montages of the NOLA native’s rise from Juilliard misfit to
omnipresent NYC busker to _Late Show_ bandleader. We see him talking
his way through ideas and fleshing out riffs and motifs on his piano,
waxing philosophical about the expectations (and ceilings) put upon
Black creatives. And we see him sledding down snowy hills with his
wife, the musician and artist Suleika Jaouad, who offhandedly reminds
her partner that “you can’t hit me with snowballs, I have
leukemia.”

No one could accuse the film of burying the lede, but what it hasn’t
disclosed yet is that when Jaouad was 22, she was diagnosed with bone
cancer and went through extensive, often agonizing treatments to fight
it for three and a half years. She wrote a _New York Times_ column
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her experience, as well as a book (_Between Two Kingdoms
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in which she spoke about the need for resilience in the face of
adversity. And on Nov. 21, 2021, the same day that the Grammy
nominations were announced, Jaouad had been informed that her cancer
had returned after nearly a decade of remission and she’d need
another bone marrow transplant. Unsurprisingly, she told Batiste to
keep soldiering on and to finish the symphony once she started
treatments again. Surprisingly, they both told Heineman to keep
filming.And it’s once _American Symphony_ begins harmonizing these
highs and lows, adding minor-key grace notes to its major-chord melody
voicings, that it not only finds its voice but begins to transcend
being “just” a making-of doc. What Batiste is creating remains a
huge part of the process, with numerous sequences devoted to him
walking folks through interludes and choruses, working with a
conductor, playing gigs on the road and, thanks to some surreptitious
camera work on Heineman’s part, a you-are-there view of Batiste’s
Grammys performance. But the film becomes less about one artist’s
quest for glory and much, much more about two artists using creativity
as a ballast, a bond, and a coping mechanism. He keeps composing. She
keeps writing and sketching, even when chemo doubles her vision. The
goal is to make it from one day to the next together.

And it’s once _American Symphony_ begins harmonizing these highs
and lows, adding minor-key grace notes to its major-chord melody
voicings, that it not only finds its voice but begins to transcend
being “just” a making-of doc. What Batiste is creating remains a
huge part of the process, with numerous sequences devoted to him
walking folks through interludes and choruses, working with a
conductor, playing gigs on the road and, thanks to some surreptitious
camera work on Heineman’s part, a you-are-there view of Batiste’s
Grammys performance. But the film becomes less about one artist’s
quest for glory and much, much more about two artists using creativity
as a ballast, a bond, and a coping mechanism. He keeps composing. She
keeps writing and sketching, even when chemo doubles her vision. The
goal is to make it from one day to the next together.

AMERICAN SYMPHONY IS SCREENING ON NETFLIX NOW.

David Fear is a Senior Editor and critic at Rolling Stone, and the
former Film Editor of Time Out NY. His work has been published in The
New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Esquire, Spin, NY Daily
News, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Moviemaker, Nashville Weekly and
numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, as all writers
must.

* Film
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* Documentary Film
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* Music Documentary
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* American Symphony
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* Jon Batiste
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