In Netflix's 'American Symphony,' Jon Batiste, wife Suleika Jaouad share joy and pain
Life has its ups and downs. Highs and lows. Joys and sorrows.
Please. Spare them the cliches. Musician Jon Batiste and writer Suleika Jaouad have endured more highs and lows than Beethoven’s Fifth. They've been put through the emotional wringer so many times, it’s a marvel there are any tears left.
And yet here they are on Zoom. Smiling. Giggling. Snuggled up next to each other in glorified pajamas.
“Resilience, we have that in common,” says Batiste, 37. His wife beams, then adds, “Over the past few years, we have had to hold the unbearably cruel events of life alongside the beautiful ones.”
How about this one: On the night in 2021 when Batiste heard he’d been nominated for an astounding 11 Grammy Awards, Jaouad, 35, started treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, an often-fatal blood disease, which had returned after a decade of remission.
The couple’s journey through the next eight months is the focal point of “American Symphony” (streaming Wednesday on Netflix), a documentary by Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “The First Wave”) that’s already won an array of film festival audience awards and is shaping up as the Oscar best documentary front-runner.
See the 2024 Grammy nominations list: SZA stands out, Taylor Swift poised to make history
“We decided to go ahead with this film, even after the diagnosis,” says Batiste.
Their motivation to share was a desire to help others going through similar journeys, says Jaouad, who made a name for herself with the bestselling 2021 book about her first battle with leukemia at age 22, “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted.”
“There’s real power when we dare to share our most unvarnished moments,” she says. “I just hoped this all might offer a sense of companionship to someone in the midst of treatment, or someone who knows someone who is.”
Batiste chimes in: “Creativity as an act of survival, that’s a theme in our household." He makes music, his wife writes and paints. “It creates a momentum and a goal, it’s a way to take a world you might not like and reshape a small part of it the way you want.”
Jon Batiste had misgivings about showing his most vulnerable moments in Netflix's 'American Symphony'
"American Symphony" takes us all along for the couple's rocky ride.
We see Batiste, who rose to national fame as the band leader for Stephen Colbert’s talk show for seven years, tackle an ambitious new project in the midst of his wife’s illness, composing a unique symphony that embraces Native American, Black American and American musical contributions. His natural confidence at times is pierced with crippling doubt.
There's Jaouad tearing up as Batiste shaves her dark locks before she heads to the hospital for a bone marrow transplant. We sit next to her as she tackles procedure after draining procedure that saps her strength and blurs her vision, leaving her pale and bald.
In one scene, a despondent Batiste, with a pillow over his head, talks to his therapist about wanting to “stop the train.”
“If I had had a say, that scene would not be in the film, I mean, I’m very much known as the joy guy,” says Batiste. “But I knew this was about Matt being the storyteller, even if we didn’t know where the story was going to end. We didn’t know if Suleika was even going to make it. But we wanted to open our lives and just shine a light on the human condition.”
There are also many impossibly beautiful moments in the film, which showcase the fierce bond between two people who met at band camp as precocious teenagers, he a keyboard whiz, she a double-bass expert. Even if a teen Batiste was a tough nut to crack, he confesses.
“She can attest, I was very awkward,” Batiste says. “There were lots of ways to misunderstand young Batiste.”
Jaouad laughs and squeezes his hand. "But you stayed true to who you were, no matter what," she says.
That determination ultimately rewarded Batiste with five Grammy statues at the 2022 ceremonies in Las Vegas, a haul that included album of the year for "We Are." We watch his parents beam with pride in the audience, while a too-sick-to-travel Jaouad claps wildly at home in New York.
Jon Batiste is hitting the road with his band and bringing along 'the family'
The documentary ends roughly a year ago, just as Jaouad visits her oncologist, who deems the transplant a success but delivers the harsh news that she'll need ongoing chemotherapy to keep cancer at bay. He encourages her to live each moment like it were her last.
“I thought about that, and found it was a bit anxiety-provoking,” Jaouad says with a laugh. “Instead, I try and live every day as if it’s my first, waking up with a curiosity and wonder that a newborn might.”
Both Batiste and Jaouad say their experiences over the past several years have taught them to refocus their priorities on a constant basis. And that’s led to a fun road trip ahead.
The Uneasy Tour: Jon Batiste to embark on first North American headlining tour in 2024
The multi-instrumentalist New Orleans native, who has been nominated for six 2024 Grammys including album, song and record of the year, recently announced his first North American headlining tour in support of his newest album "World Music Radio." The Uneasy Tour: Purifying the Airwaves for the People kicks off Feb. 16 in Portland, Oregon.
After enduring many months of isolation as she avoided all infection risks, you better believe Jaouad will be there.
“True to our desire to reshuffle priorities, we’re going to turn this tour into a family affair,” she says with a smile. “So the first question Jon asked was, are dogs allowed on the tour bus?”
The answer, of course, was yes.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jon Batiste 'American Symphony' documentary explores joy and sorrow
