On Sept.16, 22-time Grammy-nominated musician Jon Batiste performs his Big Money tour for one of the last shows of Cuthbert Amphitheater’s 2025 Summer Concert Series. His show, he tells Eugene Weekly, is “built on the concept of a circus tent.” It is a “circus of love,” if you will. 

PDX Jazz, a nonprofit out of Portland that presents jazz performances and education throughout the Pacific Northwest, is presenting Batiste, with $3 from every ticket sale going to support its efforts.

“I’ve had the great pleasure of going to different shows with [PDX Jazz] already,” Batiste says. He says that most of their performances together have “ended literally with the band marching through the audience, playing together even up into the parking lot, and it just becomes this procession of music and celebration.”

He says the setlist consists of music that “inspired me, and it goes through all different generations of music, from Chuck Berry to Tupac. It’s just a celebration of life and joy.”

Many know Batiste as Stephen Colbert’s bandleader from 2015-2022. Others may know who he is because he co-composed the music for Disney’s animated jazz musical Soul (2020). An entirely different demographic probably recognizes his name because he performed the National Anthem at the 2025 Super Bowl. 

But if you really like music, you know that Batiste is a mystifying genre-bending prodigy who has dabbled with practically every type of music under the sun. In fact, though he grew up playing drums and piano in his well-known New Orleans jazz family, he would transcribe video game scores just for fun in his free time. 

“As a kid we played sports and we played music and we also played video games. I was a big gamer,” he says. He loved the scores of games he played like Sonic the Hedgehog so much that “when I played music, I would learn those songs on the piano. They were such a big part of my life.”

Flash forward to his adulthood and he still occasionally includes those tunes in his large repertoire. 

Known mostly for his piano skills and deep music knowledge, he was the center of the 2023 Michelle- and Barack Obama-produced film American Symphony, where he composed a symphony while his wife’s cancer returned. 

He has also won more Oscars, Emmys and Grammys than you can count, and is one of only four Black musicians in the 21st century to take home the Album of the Year Grammy award for his album We Are (2021). He’s performed with everyone from Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, to Billy Joel, Madonna and A$ap Rocky, covering genres such as jazz, classical, country, swing, funk and even radio-friendly pop.

On his newest album, Big Money, he goes back in time to the deep, rich Black music of the past. Each one of the nine songs on the album explores blues, roots, country rockabilly and Americana where he plays as much guitar, fiddle and mandolin as he does piano. “I wanted to go back to the essence of recording,” he says. “With everyone just sitting around recording music. Very, very communal.” 

Big Money honors old music by “speaking to these dance rhythms, chants and singalongs and putting a lyric to it. Taking something that’s very serious with communal music and elder traditions and dancing. It’s joy mixed in with irony.”

He also says that he plays a lot with opposing moods and tones, so that “when you couple the light with darkness, it has a very infectious feel.”

As such, he says each one of the nine songs represents something different, and that each is “very essential” and “very intentional.”

In true Batiste fashion, don’t expect him to be performing note-for-note recreations of all of his songs at his show. So much of his music relies on improvisation, to the point that one song on his album, “Petrichor,” is a complete stream of consciousness. “I sat down at the piano and started recording before I had any lyrics written down,” he says. 

He says that improvising gives him essential “lightning in a bottle moments.” In doing this, he’s able to find moments where “everything is in alignment. To leave your ego at the door and leave enough space for God to come into the room.”

In allowing the music to take control of him so much throughout his career, it has made it difficult to pinpoint where he belongs genre-wise. But he doesn’t believe such labeling is necessary. “Genre is a construct that was invented for people who try to organize music,” he says. “Miles Davis was always developing and changing every year. But he was still Miles Davis.” He continues, “everything an artist is and what inspires them — that’s their genre.

As for how he classifies himself, “social music. That describes my philosophy and intention. It’s this idea of taking music from history and bringing it into the present and creating the future. I’m really thinking about different musical traditions and how they connect in unexpected ways.”

Watch Batiste capture lightning in a bottle and create the future this upcoming Tuesday at the Cuthbert Amphitheater. 

PDX Jazz presents Jon Batiste at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, Sept. 16 at Cuthbert Amphitheater, 601 Day Island Road. Doors 5 pm. Tickets start at $88 in advance or $93 day of show, and are available at TheCuthbert.com or at the door. $3 from every ticket sale will support PDX Jazz.