Jon Batiste

“I'm from Kenner, Louisiana, where music is played for every occasion in life. There's music for being born, there's music for dying... It's just natural. Families get really good because they play a lot together.”

“Whatever I do with music, I try to make it align deeply with the values and principles of who I am and what I believe the purpose of my life is.”

“The thing about Spike Lee... that's a deep experience to work with someone who is that intense and knows their vision that well. The character I play in 'Red Hook Summer' is super country and super loud. I suppose he is some version of myself.”

“When the Beatles wrote 'Paperback Writer,' it couldn't have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it's not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.”

“I was raised in the Catholic Church, and for me, the thought in the Bible and Christianity, and the spirit within that, is one of the guiding principles in my life.”

“On the road, you can't really develop a personal life.”

“Early American music and early folk music, before the record became popular and before there were pop stars and before there were venues made to present music where people bought tickets, people played music in the community, and it was much more part of a fabric of everyday life. I call that music 'root music.'”

“I still consider myself to be introverted, but everyone has a side of themselves that is amplified. Performers have to learn to tap into that, even if it's not natural.”

“You can't hate the person next to you when you're laughing and dancing together.”

“Jazz can accommodate so many things. Jazz is like the universe: it's been expanding since its creation, and it's connected to everything.”

“My whole way of looking at entertainment and audience engagement - and my ability to go from one genre to another - comes from my experience in New Orleans.”

“It's not like the old competition that you had between Leno and Letterman. It's a friendly competition between Fallon and Stephen.”

“The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.”

“There's a tradition - in New Orleans it still exists - where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.”

“We played Carnegie Hall, and that was one time where I felt... Carnegie Hall as a legendary, very venerable place to perform. I'd never heard of anyone going into the Hall and kind of standing on the seats and playing throughout the aisles and having the audience stand on the seats. So when we did that in 2013, even for me it was a shock.”

“Technology is something you have to embrace because technology is part of our generation. Digital natives, for instance, are people who grew up in a world that always had the Internet and who always had smartphones. Millennials aren't too far behind: my generation of people, who were in the mix of the Internet when it first came out.”

“I have seven uncles, and my dad played bass, they had a band together, that was the family band. And of course as the cousins got older, including myself, we joined a family band. All the cousins played. That's my heritage.”

“My sense of style is influenced by how I feel. I want to express myself because they see you before they hear you. You want to come on stage, and what you look like should represent the song you are playing or the set you are about to play or the message in your music.”

“The music is really about sharing an experience. That's why we call it Stay Human. It's like we're sharing this genuine human exchange.”

“The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it's still jazz.”