Jon Batiste’s wild and crazy idea for his ‘Saturday Night’ scoreJon Batiste’s wild and crazy idea for his ‘Saturday Night’ score
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/10/10/saturday-night-jon-batiste-score/Jason Reitman had an ambitious vision for the music in “Saturday Night,” his new film tracking — in real time — the 90 minutes leading up to the 1975 premiere of “Saturday Night Live.” The Oscar-nominated director wanted his film score to feel as frenzied as the energy coursing through his version of NBC Studios, where a young Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) bounces around, tending to frazzled writers, egomaniacal cast members and skeptical network executives before his sketch series goes on air.
Who could possibly accomplish such a task? Jon Batiste, according to most people Reitman asked.
“He had been thinking about a score … that is almost falling apart and also somehow brilliantly chaotic,” Batiste said in a recent interview. “My name kept coming up as someone who could pull it off.”
Batiste, a Grammy winner who also snagged an Oscar alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for his work on Pixar’s “Soul” (2020), took it one step further: In the spirit of SNL, he would compose the score live. He worked with musicians on set near Atlanta, where the film crew reconstructed the eighth and ninth floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The band would set up after filming wrapped on a scene, and editors would show Batiste a rough cut of the footage captured. After assessing what sort of emotion he wanted the score to channel in that moment, Batiste would improvise a composition, pointing to different instruments to join in as they recorded.
It was an environment driven by spontaneity and experimentation — which didn’t intimidate Batiste, who served from 2015 to 2022 as bandleader and musical director on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Batiste “had a real affinity for that community,” he said, adding that his fondness toward late night sparked a desire to become “a real history buff of it. I was interested in the origins of SNL.” Reitman also recruited Batiste to appear in the film as Billy Preston, SNL’s first musical guest.
So you were already a fan of early SNL before working on “Saturday Night”?
I’m a huge fan of that early era of SNL. I’ve been recording with the great Steve Jordan, who’s now the drummer in the Rolling Stones after Charlie Watts, and he was one of the first drummers on SNL. Around the time Jason called me, Steve and I were already working on recording some things and doing shows together. He had been telling me about those early years. Serendipitously, it connected with the offer to do this movie. I was already getting a crash course from one of the folks who was there.
Why did you decide to compose the score live?
The essence of the film is about youth revolution and the shift of culture that happens when, in the ’70s, you give a group of 20-somethings a slot on network television. The composing process needed to be as revolutionary, as rebellious, as frenetic as that process was. Being in the moment adds a pressure: It adds a pressure to the musicians. It adds a pressure to me, as a composer. … But it also puts pressure on Jason and his entire team, because we have to get direction as to, “Okay, this moment that hasn’t been captured in film yet, that is only text in a script, what is it that we actually want to feel here? What is it that I want to show Jon? What clip or what cut?” His two editors are incredible. They’d show me these little cuts — or segments of unfinished work they would cobble together — to convey the proper direction. I would go immediately from that moment of being prompted to the band.
It’s a very African diasporic way of composing and learning, which contrasts with the more European, classical music approach to scores that’s become the paradigm. When I was a kid, my mentors in New Orleans would compose and teach us these extended compositions. It would be a hundred pages of a score for every band member, and they would teach it to us over the course of a couple days by dictating it to us — either playing on the instrument or singing to us. That’s what I did with the band.
What does that spontaneity contribute to the music?
The band is playing live together in the room. It’s not in a studio environment where you can separate or edit or go back and fix any “mistakes.” It adds the pressure of performance in the actual composition. You have this ability to capture the musicians as they have not only just learned the piece, but then they have no margin for error in performing the piece.
You could feel that. Oh my goodness. The great Pedrito Martinez — who is one of the world’s authorities on the batá drum, which is an African drum that comes from Nigeria and is also part of the Cuban music tradition — we were blessed to have him in the band. He’s one of the greatest musicians on the planet … and you could even hear with him that he is on edge. “I just learned this. We haven’t rehearsed this. What’s the next part?” In real time, I’m conducting and giving everybody the next section.
Who else did you recruit for the band?
Thinking about New York as the backdrop, and all the different sounds and rhythms of the city, you feel this sort of melting pot of sounds in the score. [We blended] timpanis and chimes and classical percussion instrumentation with the Uptown and the Bronx. I mentioned the Afro-Cuban, Afro-Latin influence. But then there was also the sound of organs from Cory Henry, who’s from a Brooklyn community of incredible church musicians. We had a horn section like the type you’d hear in those classic shows, going back to the first variety shows. That New York jazz sound.
Vaudeville really was the first variety show. I see SNL as a part of the lineage of the instrumentations of those vaudeville shows — with the fiddle and the tap dancing and people like Jack Benny, who we studied for the score. SNL is the apex of variety shows. It’s the apex of vaudeville.
Were there any sections of the score that you had to revisit later on?
The three main themes were captured before filming. … The heart and direction of those themes lasted, but how they were orchestrated shifted — specifically when it came to the piano. There was no piano on the set. Billy Preston didn’t play a piano that night. He played a clavinet and a few different keyboard instruments. We felt like the piano would tie everything together in the score … and it gave us the opportunity to set some of the more tender moments to solo piano.
We went to Sony Studios and one of my favorite rooms in the world. … It has a beautiful room tone. If you’re a film score nerd like me, you can listen and tell where it was recorded. It was the perfect place to go, “Let’s add the piano as the glue to this score.”
Since you mentioned being a film score nerd, are there other composers whose work influenced you to think outside of the box this way?
The first real inspiration for me is going back to things like Quincy Jones and “The Pawnbroker.” Or Benny Golson. Duke Ellington’s “Anatomy of a Murder.” Miles Davis, he did a few films where he scored live with Juliette Gréco. … But I’m also thinking about Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who did “The Social Network.” That was a real watershed moment. … That’s like an anti-score, as I’m calling it.
What lessons from “Saturday Night” will you take with you to future projects?
The music being a character in the narrative, that’s a sweet spot for me in terms of composition and collaboration. I did a similar type of process on “Soul,” when I was working with Pixar.
It was beautiful to see how Jason handled that sort of proposition. You’re constantly balancing sound effects, dialogue and music [while directing a film]. In directing school, you’re taught that if you go too loud on the music when the dialogue is happening, you’ll lose people. Certain things are meant to be in service of other things. We messed with that rule throughout. It’s amazing to see it working so well. At certain moments, the score is louder than the dialogue. At certain moments, the dialogue is way up and the music is so low down there, underneath. It makes you tremble. … I’m excited to continue to explore that.
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