Genre-hopping musician Jon Batiste started off his busy year with an Oscar win for Best Original Song, before popping up as a collaborator on Beyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter — and now he’s pulling double duty on the new movie Saturday Night, composing its score and playing the late musician Billy Preston. The film, out Oct. 11th, aims to capture the behind-the-scenes chaos of the lead-up to the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live, and director Jason Reitman wanted a score to match. “He needed an anti-score,” Batiste says. “It would have to be a completely different type of score than what we consider the paradigm for film scores, which is rooted in European classical tradition. He wanted something that wasn’t that, something that felt alive and raw..”
Batiste ended up improvising much of the music live on the film’s set, which meant pulling a second shift after full days of shooting. “You get musicians like Pedrito Martinez, who’s one of the leading Afro-Latin percussionists in the world,” Batiste says, “learning a piece that I just composed, based on a cut of a film that’s not finished, that we’re recording live with no margin for error.” The process drew on his roots in New Orleans as much as it did his training at Julliard. “It felt like a very African diasporic approach,” he says. “The way I learned in New Orleans, where they would dictate the music to you verbally and they would play the music to you.”
Batiste was equally thrilled to play Billy Preston, who was SNL’s first musical guest. “It felt like his spirit was running the entire way through the process,” says Batiste. “I was watching videos of him and thinking about how he led his band.”
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Grammy is voting happening now, and Batiste — who won Album of the Year in 2022 for We Are — says Cowboy Carter should be a top contender this time around. “It is Album of the Year-worthy,” he says. “And I will say, being in on that process, there’s a lot of depth in that process and a lot of depth in that album that people aren’t even keying into just yet. So it’s definitely worthy of it.”
Batiste was one of the producers and co-writers of the rock-and-gospel-infused anthem “Ameriican Requiem,” that album’s opening track — which was the final song Beyoncé recorded for the project. He was brought into the process by producer Dion “No ID” Wilson, who happens to be his distant cousin. “She was so deep in the process of the album,” Batiste says, “It happens to a lot of artists — you’re trying to figure out how to sequence the record. Where does it end, where does it start? I guess she felt like the thing that we had come up with was a divine intervention — almost like, ‘This is the beginning of my album that I’ve been looking for and I didn’t know it.’”
