15 March 2021 Pianist and bandleader Jon Batiste is a near-perfect representative of what it means to be a millennial jazz musician in 2021. And that means that he is simultaneously a kind of jazz royalty—from a famed New Orleans jazz family with deep roots, educated both at that city’s famed Center for Creative Arts and at New York’s Julliard, and mentored by Wynton Marsalis, with two “Live at the Village Vanguard” albums under his belt—and that his most recent recording is a genre-spanning mostly-non-jazz work of autobiography. Batiste’s talents are multimedia powerful. Most prominently, perhaps, he is an on-air personality and bandleader for CBS’s