Mike G.

Monk Meditations, Monk Movements and Black Mozart, three of the four Batiste Piano Series albums, all recently released and I’m ecstatic! This piano series is part of how I process the world through the piano 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾   With Black Mozart, in the spirit of celebrating Mozart’s genius, I dreamt of this album as a collaboration between two musicians both sharing a piano bench, trading ideas across hundreds of years. I brought my life story to it and the music of my ancestors: the blues, stride, ragtime, gospel and the sounds of home in New Orleans. In all this transformation, the essence of the original composition is preserved while being infused with new meaning. The end result is something that pushes to expand the canon, and extend what we consider ‘classical’ work.   Thelonious Monk is a musical north star for me. The Monk Meditations album captures the spiritual heartbeat of his music, stretched across a whole album. You can meditate to it, pray to it, rest with it. The approach to how this album is recorded, tuned, performed and sequenced along with the musical arrangements, synth soundscapes, overtones and repetitive breath based/heart based tempos creates an atmospheric journey tailored for meditation. The tracks are woven together as one extended meditative sequence and musically constructed to induce intentional flow state, opening your mind in a focused workflow, or serving as the soundtrack to your dream state, or meditation.   This music is minimalist as a musical allegory for the stillness I believe we all must cultivate in our lives in order to hear our deepest, truest thoughts and the guidance of the Creator. There are accompanying prayer mantras in the liner notes to manifest internal and external peace. These notes are included to encourage the listener to slow down and discover the still, small voice within themselves. Jazz is a sacred tradition and this album frames jazz music as such, while also drawing deep influence from the tradition of new age and ambient music. It honors Thelonious Monk while simultaneously evoking the musical and cultural practices of Tibetan “monks”, thus creating Monk Meditations. The music is exploratory and improvisational but the improvisation is focused on building expressive, meditative textures that utilize a lot of repetition in the melody, rhythm and harmony. On Monk Movements, I arranged his compositions Blue Monk, In Walked Bud, Ugly Beauty and Brilliant Corners into piano movements that retain their essence while infusing them with my vision for pianistic glory, with the intention of eventually sharing the sheet music of these spontaneous arrangements as works to be played by pianists of all disciplines. In addition to these movements, I created original movements of my own influenced by the architectural “movement” of Monk’s music which melodically, harmonically and structurally has a very distinctive movement. I then sequenced all the pieces to exist as a whole; an extended  movement. The album was inspired a lot by the abstract expressionist art movement as well, particularly in regard to how I approached my improvisation over the forms.   Each album captures all the rawness and immediacy of performance, leaving my footsteps, exclamations and breathing in the recording to emphasize the humanistic essence of the recording. I look to continue the series for years to come exploring many threads of inspiration and sharing these time stamps with you all. Soul and science. Stillness and movement. A conversation that keeps going.

My 60 Minutes interview is LIVE! We talked about music, faith, family and the love that holds it all together. Go watch and tell me what moved you, in the comments. I love you even if I don’t know you! 🖤 youtu.be/UvVdMQARZVI?si=NDYP…