JON BATISTE strikes up the SATURDAY NIGHT band
“Saturday Night Live” is a show as iconic for its conformity-thumbing merry pranksters as it is the singers and bands of the cultural moment – a who’s who in comedy and grooviness that includes just about every great artist of the near past half century – all coaxed within the hip jazz strains of the onstage house band. Chaos and the threat of something wonderfully unexpected has always been the brand of Lorne Michaels’ reboot of the golden age of television variety shows – a behind the scenes mania that comes to the Altman-esque fore with director and co-writer Jason Reitman’s part real, part fanfic imagining of the premiere SNL episode that almost wasn’t.
One big key to the chaos is the deliberately antagonizing, head-jangling incessantly percussive score by Jon Batiste. An in-your-face bunch of bangs, grooves, Latino big band rhythms, piano and tapping to the point of insanity, it’s one more ingenious din in the shout-over-dialogue, character-jammed approach that makes this picture as much SNL as it does an NYC-spin on “Nashville.” It’s just one more element of insanity facing the harangued, Sphinx-like producer Michaels as he tries to put on a show unlike any other, a kitchen sink of musical approaches thrown directly at the listener in a way that signifies the genius of Jon Batiste at mastering the controlled chaos.
An acclaimed, multi-Grammy winning artist beyond gifted with jamming together infinite styles and turning them on a dime as can be seen in the Oscar-nominated documentary “American Symphony,” “Saturday Night” is an especially brash follow up to his Academy award winning co-score for “Soul” (composed in tandem with Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor). Yet while he ingeniously lets loose with his talent for riffs that run down the history of the European and American songbook, “Saturday Night” captures the way more melodic grooves of the show’s jazz style, especially in its glorious theme finale that shows the storm clouds have lifted (or only just begun). Better yet, “Saturday Night” plays to Batiste’s strengths as an actor-singer as he delightfully embodies O.G. musical guest Billy Preston, all with a sunny energy that talks Garrett Morris down from the self-doubting roof.
Giving a call in from the command center of a musical brain that’s constantly on go, Jon Batiste talks about the method to his scoring his ersatz honking madness that’s live from New York.
What does Saturday Night Live mean to you?
I remember when I was a kid and hearing stories and eventually seeing the tape of family members of mine as the musical guests on “Saturday Night Live” in the 70s. Their band was The Funky Meters from New Orleans, Louisiana. So that was my first memory of Saturday Night Live.
What struck you about the way musicians were presented on the show?
“Saturday Night Live” tried to approximate what it was like to be like at a club. It felt like the big stage and the big lights of Broadway. It had the energy of New York, and made you feel like you were felt like you were just hanging out on a Saturday night, almost giving juke joint vibes. I thought that that was pretty cool to watch in particular when I looked at those tapes from the 70’s. The show was not super produced. It wasn’t a whole lot of extra lights of bells and whistles. It was just a band up there jamming and people having a good time.
What was your reaction when you were approach for the “Saturday Night” film?
Jason Reitman, the incredible great director led the charge with calling me and saying, “You know, I want to do this film. And I have this vision of the score really being the villain in the movie, and the music is an allegory for the clock, the ticking of time. The villain is putting pressure on this cast of 20 something year olds who are going to revolutionize TV, but don’t know if they’re going to make it to air on their first episode. So Jason told me this vision of we could create that musical pressure? The score has to function in a myriad of different ways. And that’s when I started to figure out that this is not your typical Mahler-derivative European classical score with strings and an orchestra that is telegraphing to you how you can feel in a moment. As beautiful as that works, this is more of the score as a character, the score as sound design, and a score that also has to have the humanistic, nostalgic and wistful moments, as well as the moments of pressure as the antagonist. So the score was meant to sound and feel like many things that function in many roles in this organized chaos, to almost feel as if it’s diegetic music that’s happening in real time. It’s something that feels as if it could fall apart at any moment, but it’s also super cohesive. So that when you watch the 90-minute film and there’s music all throughout, you feel carried through the film. This is all the discovery and conversation that led to the choice of not only composing, but also capturing the recording of the score on the set after filming each night. So it’s not like you have a jam session where you’re playing right through the takes or the shots.
So after the shooting was done, then you’d just out there jamming and improvising then?
No, there’s even more of a specific process where we dialed it in even further. We would basically shoot from the morning until the evening, go eat dinner, get in street clothes and then come back to set. Sometimes you’d have a band, and at other times it would be me and a few musicians, not a full band. The cast would hang out often with us. The crew would come, Jason, his team, the editors, everyone would be there. Jason would show me not a finished cut of anything, but just really a prompt that he would come up with to give me inspiration and a direction of what the scene was going to be, or what it could feel like. For instance there would be about a minute or two at most of footage. And then after about one or two watches and a brief conversation, I would then go to the band and take that inspiration and dictate to them what we’d be playing. I would hum it or sing it or play it on my instrument. And then we would do one or two takes of a very specific compositional theme. If you listen to the soundtrack of the film, there are three themes that I composed that reoccur and are redressed and represented throughout the entire film. So it feels very organic, it feels like it’s unfolding in this in this way. But it’s also very much structured in the way you’d craft a film score. It’s just very deceptively designed to feel like many things. We didn’t know if that approach would work until the film was cut together. But it end up actually working when the film was cut together.
In “American Symphony,” we saw what you go through with anxiety. And the purpose of the score here is to produce anxiety, to almost attack the audience with the feeling of time-ticking stress. Do you think what you’ve been through helped you reach that feeling?
The goal here is to feel like real life and get across the feeling we all have with pressure, this feeling of not knowing if we’re going to make it to the other side of something It’s definitely an inspiration. I think it was more so about me thinking about all of the sounds that I’ve heard in vaudeville. There’s tap dancing in the score in the tradition of the great vaudevillian Bojangles, a fiddle in the tradition of Jack Benny. In that way, “Saturday Night Live” is the apex of vaudeville, this sort of variety show. It’s evolved into the ultimate variety show, variety as well as a cultural commentary about what’s on the cutting edge. So I wanted to both pay tribute to the cast of SNL from that time and a tribute to what the show represents in culture and the backdrop of New York City. It’s a diverse milieu of sounds, rhythms and cultures. It was about figuring out how we put all of that together and then make it sound like the anxiety of the clock so I could explore all of those themes and homages, both directly and indirectly with the sound and the sonic textures. It’s a rich color palette and rich sound world for that anxiety to exist within.
Another memorable scene in “American Symphony” is when the power blows out on the stage of your big night at Carnegie Hall. It’s that kind of anticipating something going wrong that’s one of the draws of watching “Saturday Night Live.” Was that an inspiration in your approach as well?
One thousand percent. In fact, that’s why I wanted to have the music recorded on set in part because the band would be learning music and recording it without separation, without the isolation of being in booths at a studio. When they’re learning this music, there’s a great edge in their playing. The great Pedro Martinez is playing percussion on the score. He’s one of the foremost authorities on the Afro Cuban tradition of drumming. He’s learning these parts and he’s got to record them in a way he’s not used to for a big studio film. There’s no sheet music or charts. There’s just this idea that is being presented to you in real time. So I think all of that was a part of embedding the score with the sense of edge, urgency and the risk of falling apart, which was what was happening with Lorne in the cast at that time.
You go a wonderful job as an actor as well here playing Billy Preston. Did you watch the footage of him from the premiere to try to exactly recreate his performance? Or did Jason just let you do your own thing?
Jason is such a deep director because at times he’d say, “I want you to underprepare.” And at other times he’d say, “I want you to watch this specific thing.” He knew I watched a lot of videos of Billy because of my interest in the black musical diaspora. So he gave me direction knowing where I’m coming from. Because we know that about each other, there’s a sense of real direction, but also collaboration again. He wanted it to feel like Billy, but in certain moments he knew the best way to get there was to say, “I don’t want you to know what we’re going to do or how we’re going to record it or how the camera’s going to dance around you.” The choreography of the cameras was like a dance – in particular in the performance moments where they’re so iconic if you’ve watched Billy perform, he has a gait and a movement that’s very specific. So I I keyed into that, but I’d already done so as a musician who loves this music and had studied a lot of Billy Preston, mainly as an organist, but also as a performer.
I think for my generation, our image of Billy Preston was all about transforming from a weathervane in the “Sergeant Pepper” musical!
Yeah, you remember that, right? I think that was a whole generation’s introduction to Billy Preston to be perfectly honest Listen that was it man. Billy finds the texture in the music with the organ and with the keys that is always there. It was the thing you were hearing in your imagination and he makes it real.
When we finally get to hear the recognizable “Saturday Night Live” theme, it’s almost like this huge breath of release from the tension and the joy of relief. Did that make it even more important to have full, unabashed melody come into the score with that?
Yeah, it’s such an iconic theme. You hear it literally every Saturday night that you watch the show. It just becomes a ritual. So I was keying into that theme, which was the opposite when I was thinking of the score, it’s like you’re building a broken version of something that is referring to the theme in a spiritual way. It’s evoking that sort of ethos of that theme, but in a way that’s pressurized and obtuse. So when the theme comes, you feel like, “Oh wow! I recognize this from all those years, but it also somehow it fits.” It’s an oasis at the end of this journey for many reasons. And within this film, it fits with the sonic palate of what’s been happening. But it also is a relief to what’s been happening. So there’s so many moments and so many connected threads like that that had to be really engineered.
Having co-won the Best Score Oscar with “Soul” alongside Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, is scoring now something that’s easier for you? And do you want to do more of it?
Well, you know, I love being immersed in a project. With “Soul,” I was immersed in it before there was any footage, just really discussing the vision of it with the core team. I put a lot of myself into it beyond just the music, and that’s what I love about now being able to be Billy Preston on the “Saturday Night” set. I got to really be a part of the cast, and composing the score took that a step further. I was immersed. I’m locked in. And that’s how I love being a part of film and contributing to it in any that I can. So whenever I have that feeling of connectivity to something and it feels like it’s pulling me in, then that’s the next time you’ll see me doing this.
See “Saturday Night” in theaters, with Jon Batiste’s soundtrack on Verve Records HERE
Special thanks to Natasha Barrett at Perception PR
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