BERKELEY — Jon Batiste brought New Orleans to the Greek Theatre on Saturday night.
It was a balmy evening that felt more like the Crescent City than the East Bay, and for the final stop of his U.S. run, Batiste turned the bowl into something between a piano recital, a religious experience and a drum circle.
Nobody was allowed to stand still.
The set ran short and skipped 2025 album, Big Money, entirely, but what remained had a clear purpose. Underneath the party was a history lesson.
Batiste, the product of a storied Louisiana musical family, kept circling back to where Black music comes from, and he wanted the crowd to feel that history in their bodies, not just hear it.
Before long, he said so outright.
“Public service announcement,” he said. “We really mean that we want to evoke the fullest sense of freedom. It’s one of the oldest traditions. Where we come from, people are not as still as you are. I want to see you side to side, back to back, front to front.”
Batiste’s set came out swinging.
He wailed on saxophone as drums and cymbals crashed around him and lights flashed across the stage. Then he slid onto the piano beside one of his vocalists for “I Need You,” the two belting the blues in unison.
Even with three percussionists onstage, her voice cut through all of them.
Batiste traded keys for guitar on “Freedom,” his ode to moving your body as an act of liberation, and someone in the crowd shouted, “Thank you!”
Percussion rattled underneath swelling vocals as the song built toward release, sending a charge through the bowl before dissolving into clapping. Batiste capped it by running up three octaves.
Batiste’s young nephew came onstage to shake a percussion instrument while Batiste showed off on melodica — or “harmonaboard,” as he calls it — playing full chords.
The audience sang while the band played underneath during “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It was audience participation in the truest sense.
Batiste is restless by nature, and the middle of the set became a showcase for just how many directions he can take a familiar idea.
He wove Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” into a dazzling solo. With a bandmate on tambourine, he made his way to the drum kit for a stretch that edged into Latin fusion, then opened into a drum circle before the band cleared space for his own solo.
It was a move the group returned to all night: take a fragment, speed it up and stack rhythms over it until the whole thing reached a fervor.
Back at the piano, Batiste dug into Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk,” then slowed Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” into a soulful ballad.
The Impressions’ “It’s All Right” became a call-and-response, Batiste grinning as the crowd answered back with varying degrees of confidence.
“Sing it to yourself and sing it to your neighbor,” he urged. “Sing it from your soul.”
The volume climbed.
A faithful cover of Jorge Ben Jor’s “Mas Que Nada,” with Batiste at the piano, followed.
Taken together, the covers were more of a map more than a jukebox.
“When the Saints Go Marching In” pointed to New Orleans, “Blue Monk” to bebop, “It’s All Right” to Chicago soul rooted in gospel call-and-response and “Mas Que Nada” to Brazilian samba. They were also songs much of the audience already knew, making them ideal vehicles for the participation Batiste had demanded from the start.
For “Worship,” Batiste strapped on a pair of headphones sprouting antennas. Lights strobed as the audience bounced in place and the percussion grew more frantic.
When the song ended, he set the headphones gingerly on the piano and paused to take in the roar.
The high point was “Für Elise.” Batiste took Beethoven apart piece by piece and rebuilt it with one twist after another, including a bass line that sounded lifted from a Japanese video game and other Beethoven phrases threaded through the arrangement. Then he found his way back, reassembling the melody until it was recognizable again by the final bars.
Batiste has been making this case for a while: the classical canon belongs to improvisers, too.
His 2024 album Beethoven Blues recast some of the composer’s most familiar pieces through blues, gospel and jazz, treating Beethoven not as a museum piece but as source material. He’d followed the concept this year, taking on not only Monk with two albums but Mozart with Black Mozart.
The method depends on recognition. You have to know where “Für Elise” is supposed to go to feel the thrill when Batiste swerves away from it and the satisfaction when he finds his way back.
That’s also why “Tom’s Diner” works so well in his hands: the melody is sparse and familiar enough that the audience can keep the original in mind while he bends it into something else.
Batiste moved into Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” touching and emotional and over almost too soon.
“Let’s put our lights in the air,” he said, and the bowl lit up. “I love you! One more time together, we are one.”
With that, he moved into “Butterfly” to close the night.
A week earlier at the Hollywood Bowl, Batiste played three songs from Big Money, an unreleased song and covers of Prince, James Brown, Michael Jackson and Marvin Gaye.
Berkeley got none of them.
What remained was the show’s spine: mostly We Are and World Music Radio material, “Für Elise” and standards the crowd already knew.
When the set shrank, the new material and pop tributes went first.
Listen to what survived the cuts and a message emerges. “Freedom,” “I Won’t Back Down,” “It’s All Right” and “Worship” are, in different ways, songs about standing firm and choosing joy. It’s difficult not to hear that differently on the campus where the Free Speech Movement began.
Batiste never made that connection himself. His messages all night were about love, freedom and gratitude. He let the music carry the rest and asked only that the crowd move.
Opener and longtime San Francisco resident Nick Waterhouse was a smart pairing.
His sound, steeped in vintage soul, fit naturally with a night so devoted to musical roots, and he warmed up the Greek before Batiste touched a key, even name-dropping New Orleans in the song leading into “Medicine.”
The two go back years.
“Working at the record store was the whole reason Jon and I met, and I want to thank Jon so much,” Waterhouse said.
About The Author
Sery Morales grew up in a small town that only had three radio stations: country, Christian and classic rock. Her tastes are much wider. She plays the flute, piano, recorder and electric guitar—though not very well. To make up for her mediocre skills, she befriended musicians around Oakland for the last 10 years; not because they were musicians, but because they laughed at her jokes.
