Jon Batiste on joining Little Simz' Meltdown: 'the system is trying to commodify young artists'

“Meltdown represents a lot of my philosophy of music, which is really genre-less and expansive and more rooted in culture and tradition - and making those things become brand new.”

So says musician, composer, bandleader and all-round music phenomenon, Jon Batiste, one of the performers at this year’s Meltdown, neatly summing up what the Southbank’s yearly festival represents at its core.

“If you take something from past, bring it into the present, to create the future, you have to rail against those boundaries and rail against those narrow depictions of what an artist should be, as defined by genre. That's what I love about a festival like this. It owns that musical approach.”

Well exactly, and the curator who invited Batiste to play this year certainly embodies that too. Little Simz follows on from past curators including David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Patti Smith and Yoko Ono, in being an the kind of adventurous artist testing the limits of music.

“Any great artist like Little Simz is going to be classified based on a genre of their own,” adds Batiste, “Thelonious Monk said it best when describing the term ‘genius’, saying the genius is the one that's most like themselves.

I personally subscribe to the ancient Greek philosophy that you're not a genius, but a genius is with you. It comes to you and it can come to anyone and you're the vessel.

But if the genius is the one most like himself, that fits, because if you happen to attract the muse and are the vessel at a certain amount of time in your life - which comes through hard work and craft to keep it – you’re constantly digging into your own brand of genius and your own vision of music, and it's constantly evading any sort of classification.”

Little Simz, this year's curator of the Southbank Centre's annual Meltdown festival (Thibaut Grevet)

This then is what is echoed in Meltdown as a run of shows, where a hugely diverse range of acts always gather to play. Simz has chosen the likes of The Streets, Alewya, Miraa May, James Blake, and MEGA. For the Southbank’s Head of Contemporary Music, Jane Beese, who has worked on many Meltdowns, says the idea is, “you're looking into an artist's record collection.,” but stresses that’s only the beginning:

“Whilst it does generally start from a music point of view, we've always encouraged curators to lean into that cross art-from work, with the Southbank Centre being a huge art centre with loads of different arts.

With Bowie, for example, he was running an online site called BowieArt.com at the time, so he was really keen to provide a platform for young visual artists. We actually created a gallery space within the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall.

With David Byrne, there was quite a lot of dance and performance. With Patti Smith, there was, you know, a lot of spoken word and poetry.”

In this vein, Simz has creative workshops as a key part of her Meltdown, and perhaps even more so than any other year, there is an emphasis on engaging with young people.

“It was the first topic of conversation with Simz,” says Beese, “Forty per cent of the work that we do at Southbank is free to attend, and there’ll be lots of free things for people to access. But we've also started a project through our public program team which is engaging with 11 young producers aged 16-25 who will help create work for the festival.”

This is exactly the kind of approach Batiste has built into his life and work, making sure that he is both setting an example for a younger generation and also actively teaching and mentoring, particularly for those of similar heritage to him.

“It’s a role I've willingly accepted and take on,” he says, “I'm a relatively young guy, I'm 38, but I've been doing live performance and music making and composing all these different aspects of music from a tradition, but which is not as prevalent in popular culture.

It's allowing me both publicly and privately to share with my colleagues, young artists, and students studying music, to show them a whole facet of their culture, of who we are, of where we come from and what we represent on the world stage, whether we know it or not.”

The star, born in Metairie, Louisiana, into a family who were a New Orleans music dynasty, says he’s hyper aware of being part of different traditions and cultures – “the lineage of the culture of New Orleans, the lineage of the culture of jazz… it’s an inheritance, I was born into it and can carry it forward, but how you carry it forward is up to you” – and that his dedication to understanding this and studying it, inherently means you want to then actively pass this on.

“I do a lot of work to build the tools in different roles I take on,” he says, “Trying to provide educational opportunities, and disrupt the status quo of it. I’m like an open book, anytime I’m with artist or colleagues, I’m known to share as much detail as you can stand.

But I think as an artist in culture that's in a unique space, I find that a lot of times me sticking to my beliefs, the principles of my artistry and the development of excellence within a craft, unearthing traditions and recontextualising things and just existing in that space provides a blueprint for people who want to follow.”

The Southbank Centre's Head of Contemporary Music, Jane Beese (Southbank Centre)

And you can certainly imagine a whole new swathe of young people picking up such a blueprint from Batiste, and indeed the rest of the festival. Lord knows they need a bit of inspiration and a bit of a hand right now.

Beese says, “I think there is an increasing awareness amongst artists that there's a sort of obligation to give back and an obligation to help the next generation coming up. Especially as the world becomes a more confusing and dangerous place. The community of artists that Simz has brought to this event are pretty collegiate, supporting each other and just a good demonstration that anybody can get on stage and do this.”

Batiste chimes with this, with a kind of manifesto for how music, and indeed the arts in general, can continue to flourish and have a huge impact on the world.

“I really think is the way forward is if artists consider themselves as a part of a collective of this generation versus as singular artists on their own journey, we're all on a journey and if you represent something and someone else represents something else and then we all represent the whole of what our generation is all about.

We can carry forward all of the incredible inheritance of our collective lineages and that's the way that we can overcome a system that is really trying to destroy the creative process and make it for sale, to commodify it. Everything is for sale today. That's the biggest problem of being a young artist. And you have to understand that everything isn't for sale.

There's some things that have deep intrinsic value, and you may be the only one in your orbit that knows that, and that can hold the line. If you hold the line long enough, you'll get to the other side. But it takes a lot.

You gotta just see other people who are doing it. You gotta see other things, other possibilities.”

What better place to see these things is in London at the Southbank. Don’t miss it - and bring your kids.

Little Simz’s Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre until 22 Jun. Jon Baptiste plays the Royal Festival Hall on 21 June