BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — In one sense, 2022 should have been one of the best years of Jon Batiste’s life.
Batiste, a New Orleans-born pianist and Oscar winner who came to national renown as the original musical director of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2015, had just released “We Are” to critical praise, as well as receiving eight Grammy nominations for the album. He was also about to debut a new symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
But it was also the worst year for his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, whose leukemia had returned after nearly a decade in remission.
The year of the couple’s “life of contrasts” was captured in “American Symphony,” a new documentary released on Netflix Wednesday. Throughout the film, Batiste and Jaoud juggle each other’s marriage, careers and health–both physical and mental– ahead of the release of Batiste’s symphony.
With moments of playful tenderness shown between the couple, like reading in bed together or playing “Simon Says” while walking through the cancer ward of the hospital, there are also moments of vulnerability. Moments like Batiste talking to his therapist on the phone while under the covers or Jaoud receiving news about the future of her health are on full display, moments that were once private for the couple are now out in the world.
For Jaoud, who wrote openly about her health struggles in her 2021 memoir “Between Two Kingdoms” and continues to write about her life in her blog “The Isolation Journals,” being candid was a difficult but important choice the couple made in agreeing for their story to be filmed.
“Nothing about living through a life-threatening illness makes you want to share,” Jaoud said. “If anything, it makes you want to retreat and cocoon and hide, but I deeply believe that when we dare to share our most unvarnished vulnerability, when we dare to truthfully answer the question ‘How are you?’ and we are able to open ourselves up both to the incredibly hard facts of life and also the beautiful ones, we learn again and again that we’re more alike than we are different.”
Another recurring theme of the documentary is authenticity to oneself, whether it be Batiste talking about his concerns of breaking out of the public’s preconceived notions about him or being pigeonholed as an artist to Jaoud’s honesty about her feelings throughout her chemotherapy treatments. Batiste said that as a public person, he feels he has a responsibility to not just show the “highlights” of one’s life, but to show “the human condition we’re all facing.”
“We all have to face the hard times and, sometimes, the hard times are in the midst of the best of times and that’s life. So authenticity for me, as someone in the public eye, is the ability to look at that truth and share that and show that we’re all connected and we’re all one,” Batiste said. “The loneliness that we’re facing individually is something that actually unites us and that should make us all feel less alone in the world.”
Jaoud said that during her and Batiste’s tumultuous year, they both worked on staying present, something they continue to do now in their marriage.
“A friend of mine once said that when you travel, you take three trips: there’s the travel of packing and preparing, there’s the trip that you’re actually on, and there’s the trip that you remember, but the key is to stay present in whichever trip you’re currently in,” she said. “And so, I think an experience like what we lived through made us hyper aware of how fleeting and finite our time here on Earth, for all of us, really is and that all that you really have is the present moment and if you’re not meeting that present moment it goes by so fast.”
Echoing Jaoud, Batiste said every moment–both good and bad– are meant to be cherished.
“There’s so much in each moment, even when we don’t necessarily see it. So being present in it and cherishing those moments, even the most mundane, is very important and finding stillness, to be still, in them,” he said.
A trailer for “American Symphony” can be viewed here.
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