Late Show: An Evening of Genius Music Composition and Instrumental Virtuosity with Jon Batiste

The CMA is pleased to host a second performance by five-time Grammy award winner Jon Batiste. Small bites, snacks, and cocktails are available for purchase in the CMA atrium for 9:30 p.m. ticket holders after 7:00 p.m. 

Parking is available in the CMA garage at a $20 flat rate—the member discount does not apply for this event. 

One of today’s most prolific and accomplished musicians, Batiste has won multiple Grammy awards, an Oscar, and is nominated this year for another Oscar for Best Original Song (with Dan Wilson). Born and raised in New Orleans, Batiste studied and received both a BA and MFA at the world-renowned Juilliard School in New York City. From 2015 until 2022, Batiste served as the bandleader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS. In 2018, he received a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots, and in 2020, he received two Grammy nods for the albums Chronology of a Dream: Live at the Village Vanguard and Meditations (with Cory Wong).

Batiste composed and performed music for the Disney/Pixar film Soul, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score alongside fellow composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. He is the second Black composer in history, after legendary jazz musician Herbie Hancock, to win an Academy Award for composition. Soul also earned Batiste a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, an NAACP Image Award, and a Critic’s Choice Award.

Batiste’s album We Are was released in March 2021 to overwhelming critical acclaim. Subsequently, he was nominated for 11 Grammys across seven different categories, a first in Grammy history. He went on to win five of those Grammys, including Album of the Year.

Batiste’s latest studio album, World Music Radio—featuring collaborators including Jon Bellion, Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne, and more—draws inspiration from his mission to create community with the power of music. The album received widespread critical acclaim for its universal message and genre-defying sound, hailed by NPR as “a sprawling exploration of what global music can sound like,” and by the Associated Press as “a mesmerizing way to dial into Batiste’s eclectic and wide musicality.”

Along with his longtime partner, Emmy award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Suleika Jaouad, Batiste is the subject of the upcoming documentary portrait American Symphony, which premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival. The documentary follows the two artists through one of the most intense years of their lives: Batiste is amid the creation of a symphonic masterwork that will be performed at Carnegie Hall and is nominated for an unprecedented 11 Grammys the same week Jaouad discovers the leukemia she battled a decade earlier has returned.