I’ve had the singles from Jon Batiste’s Black Mozart on rotation, and I keep noticing the same thing: I put it on to work, and it’s the perfect assistant for deep concentration. That’s the highest compliment I can give an instrumental record.
The full album is out August 14, the second instalment in what Batiste calls his Piano Series. The first, Beethoven Blues, spent five consecutive weeks at number one on Billboard’s Classical Albums chart and nine on Classical Crossover, so there was already an audience primed for what he’s doing here: taking a canonical composer apart and putting him back together through a Black American lens. This time it’s Mozart. He’s spoken about Mozart as someone who absorbed everything around him and made it entirely his own, which is a fairly accurate description of what Batiste himself is doing to the material.
A handful of singles are out ahead of the release, and they tell you most of what you need to know. “Alla Blues” takes the rondo shape of Mozart’s writing and lets it fall into something bluesier. “Gospel Andante,” released on Juneteenth along with a video shot in New Orleans, pulls the melody toward church gospel. “Shine” is the one I keep returning to for its lightness. Across all of them you can hear the full vocabulary of Black American piano tradition. These two traditions found their roots centuries apart.
What makes this record work is that it never feels like an exercise. You can hear how much Batiste enjoys playing this music through the way he handles his instrument: there’s a looseness. It isn’t about proving a point about genre.
Practically speaking, this is the record I’d put on for two very different occasions. First, work: it has enough forward motion to keep you focused without the distraction of lyrics, and it never feels clinical. Second, the tail end of a dinner party, the dessert course, when the conversation has slowed and you want something in the background that still fits the mood.
Batiste has said the goal across these albums is to curate a conversation between these composers with himself at the piano, honouring them and adding to what they left behind. Black Mozart is the clearest evidence yet that he means it.