Instrument of Funk

Jon Batiste’s professors at the Juilliard School in New York were so disturbed by it that they called in a psychotherapist. One of his hometown mentors, the jazz icon Wynton Marsalis, was likewise appalled. “Get that thing off the stage,” he’d gripe. Even workaday subway riders, herding past Batiste’s underground performances, might’ve thought something was off-kilter, unusual, all that incredible virtuosity funneled into…what’s that thing even called, anyway?

“Melody horn, melodion, harmonichord, mouth piano…” Batiste is inventorying the names for the peculiar instrument in his hands, the source of all that former tension but also, more important, almost lifelong delight. “If you look online,” he says, “there’s even more.” Indeed there are: pianica, melodihorn, triola, hooter, piano horn, and the rather sultry-sounding orgamonica. But most players, Batiste included, call it a melodica.

Few if any players, however, have devoted as much passion and energy to the; Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe–winning film composer (for Pixar’s ); jazz piano prodigy turned master, with more than a dozen albums and EPs stretching back to his teens (including 2019’s Grammy-nominated ); actor (David Simon’s and Spike Lee’s ); symphonic composer (his debuts at Carnegie Hall this year); educator (he’s the co–artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem); and activist (the protest marches he led in the wake of George Floyd’s killing fueled the songwriting on , his most recent album). But close to Batiste’s heart is another, less heralded role: evangelist and ambassador for this many-named German instrument that resembles the offspring of a piano and a kazoo and that finally, in his hands, is getting the respect and exposure it deserves.