Jon Batiste brought a piece of New Orleans down to the Bahamas — and a new friend, too.
The “Freedom” singer opened his first-ever jazz club at the Baha Mar resort in Nassau over the weekend with the help of Joanna “JoJo” Levesque.
The unlikely duo took the stage together Friday night in front of a sold-out crowd of nearly 300 VIP guests, including “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart and several Bahamian dignitaries.
Music lovers never would have guessed that JoJo, 34, was newer to jazz as she belted near-perfect renditions of “‘Round Midnight,” “Never Will I Marry,” and “A Night in Tunisia” with Batiste, 38, on piano.
The “Leave (Get Out)” singer brought old Hollywood flair to the Caribbean in a black, jacquard Dolce & Gabbana column dress with rhinestone details. She completed the look with bouncy curls and a red lip.
Meanwhile, the composer rocked a silver satin suit and custom Louis Vuitton shoes for the big night at his eponymous venue.
While this was Batiste’s first time playing with — and meeting — JoJo, the Oscar winner is no stranger to jazz clubs.
Batiste unknowingly spent “half his life” prepping, preparing and conceptualizing the perfect jazz space — despite never necessarily dreaming of having his own.
“I’ve been on TV, I’ve done all of these things, but I started in jazz clubs, and now it’s almost like 20 years later to come back … it just makes sense,” he told Page Six before the show.
“There’s a symmetry to it. It’s a very conspicuous thing that it would happen right now. So it’s not necessarily like it was a dream. It’s more just, it is the manifestation of a dream.”
The Louisiana-born musician began playing in his family’s blues group, the Batiste Brothers Band, when he was just 8.
By 14, he had already cemented himself as a musical prodigy, even playing alongside Ray Charles’s saxophone player, David “Fathead” Newman, before taking his talents to Juilliard.
“Growing up in New Orleans, I was always in jazz clubs, you know, not just jazz clubs but venues and community gathering spots where you would go and you would basically create an energy with people who you knew, probably in your family lineage and in each other’s lives for generations,” he said.
“And then I moved to New York City, and there’s such a jazz tradition and nightlife in the clubs.”
The five-time Grammy winner compared the storied history of jazz clubs in NYC and NOLA to the “amazing culture” of the Bahamas.
“It is similar to, you know, the backdrop and energy sounds and rhythms in New Orleans; there’s such a kinship between both,” he said.
“The sound of what I hear when I go here to Junkanoo is the same feeling that I get at Mardi Gras, and I heard some of the same songs, some of the same melodies,” he continued.
“So it’s like, already the musicology … it’s like, oh, we’re already cousins culturally. And this is a perfect place to sort of curate something that celebrates all of it and then invites the world in, and it just becomes something that is not like anything else.”
Batiste wanted the space to feel “authentic and intentional,” filling the venue with work from Bahamian artists and inviting local talent to perform when he can’t be there.
The “Be Who You Are” singer said he feels a strong connection to the Caribbean country given his ties to New Orleans, “where the industry of tourism conceals who we actually are, rather than reveals.”
In both places, Batiste explained that things that are “so deep and so profound and so essential to culture” easily become “trivialized into just the festive” or just “things that you can commodify and capitalize on.”
However, he said that “jazz, inherently, is a form of music that goes against that.”
“It never really dies, even though there’s this, like, kitsch, crass covering that this, this milieu of tourism — in the worst way — that has engulfed it for so long,” he said.
“It’s still so potent, the core thing that made it that way in the first place … is still so resilient and so potent that it can’t, it can’t be cheapened or corrupted to the point that it no longer exists.
“So then you just got to have culture bearers, and people understand what it actually is, come in and pull out the weeds,” he added.
Jon Batiste’s Jazz Club is now open.
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