Black Mozart

“Improvisation, which people associate with jazz, was fundamental to classical music,” Jon Batiste tells Apple Music Classical. The American singer, songwriter, composer, pianist and musical all-rounder, former bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, is on a mission to restore spontaneity to the classics. Black Mozart, successor to his Beethoven Blues album, sees Batiste engage in a deeply personal solo dialogue with works composed around 250 years ago. Mozart’s music, he says, is eternally modern, always momentous and undeniably universal. “Mozart was a grand improviser,” notes Batiste. “He would frequently perform entirely spontaneous compositions, things that were left open for his gift for improvisation. Many of his great works were formed from improvisations that were then codified into a written score. The honour of your work is when it becomes something that people take forward and are in conversation with in their own ways—they extend it, they bend it, they twist it. As the years go by and people continue to be in conversation with it, the melodies become ubiquitous, and even the composer takes a back seat to the discourse around their work, enriching folks long after they’re gone.” Black Mozart draws its title from Batiste’s re-imaginings of the composer from the perspective of Black American music. The album, he says, is like an open exchange with Mozart’s compositions. “I believe the great classical canon of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach and all those who we study and play has reached the point where it’s ripe for interpolation, reinvention and an update with all of the great cultural and musical traditions that have happened since their time. We’ve had the blues, we’ve had jazz, we’ve had all types of contemporary forms which they did not have the benefit of incorporating into their work. And we also need to rediscover the spirit and utility of improvisation in classical music.” The seeds of the latter project were planted in Batiste’s cre