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- The 35-year-old jazzman is the top nominee with 11 chances to take home a gold gramophone.
- He has recorded with legendary artists from Stevie Wonder to Prince to Willie Nelson.
- He is also the creative director of Harlem's National Jazz Museum.
This year's Grammys shortlists feature several bona fide pop megastars, including Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, and overnight sensation Olivia Rodrigo. There is also Jon Batiste.
The 35-year-old jazzman is the top nominee with 11 chances to take home a gold gramophone, but he's not exactly a household name outside music circles.
The musical talent and artistic vision of Batiste, the Oscar-winning scion of a prominent New Orleans musical dynasty, have made him an industry mainstay for years, a red carpet regular with a prodigious body of work and an eye towards social justice.
He has recorded with legendary artists from Stevie Wonder to Prince to Willie Nelson. He is perhaps best known to the broader American public as the bandleader and musical director of Stephen Colbert's popular late-night comedy show.
He is also the creative director of Harlem's National Jazz Museum. Last year, he took home an Oscar, Golden Globe, and a BAFTA for co-composing the soundtrack of Pixar's animated hit "Soul" with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The sleeper nominations frontrunner - who nabbed three Grammy nods in past years but has yet to win - will go up against flashy, big-budget releases from artists including Bieber and Rodrigo in major categories including Album and Record of the Year.
Batiste is also up for awards in fields spanning genre and medium, including R&B, jazz, American roots and contemporary classical. He is also in contention for Best Music Video.
"WOW!! Thank you, God!! I love EVERYBODY! I'm so grateful to my collaborators and ancestors," he tweeted after the nomination lists were released last fall.
'Subconscious emotion'
Born 11 November 1986, in Louisiana, Batiste began playing drums and other percussion instruments as a child with his family, which includes a long line of gospel and jazz artists.
As a pre-teen, he switched to the piano, releasing his debut album "Times in New Orleans" at age 17.
A classmate of Trombone Shorty, Batiste graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in 2004, attending New York's prestigious Juilliard School, where he completed both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in music.
He became a mainstay of the jazz community, releasing several recording projects and performing across the globe.
He and his band Stay Human secured the high-profile Late Show with Stephen Colbert gig starting in 2015, bringing his music to millions of eyes each weeknight.
Batiste has emerged as a voice of social justice in recent years, notably taking part in June 2020's Juneteenth celebration in Brooklyn as protests raged over the police murder of a Black man, George Floyd.
In March 2021, he released his eighth studio album We Are, which he has said he put together largely before the mass protests and the Covid-19 pandemic but whose content offered prescient messages of hope and community.
A genre-spanning effort that fuses jazz with soul, hip-hop, pop, and R&B, Batiste has called the record "a culmination of my life to this point."
"You know the music is something that speaks to a subconscious emotion, and it felt like something that we all were feeling in 2020, and the music just brings it to the surface in a way that I think nothing else can," he told the online music magazine, Atwood, in 2021.
"It's a universal language."
