Review: Jon Batiste floors Akron Civic Theatre audience with a musical masterclass (photos)

“This is not a concert,” Batiste told the crowd mid-set. “This is a spiritual practice.” And he wasn’t exaggerating. From the first note of “Let God Lead,” the room became less of a performance space and more of a revival tent.

His leadership style on stage—equal parts maestro and mad scientist—embraced unpredictability as a creative engine. There was chaos, yes, but a managed chaos, the kind that breeds innovation.

Batiste’s band, a 10-piece force of brass, percussion, strings and soul, followed every left turn like seasoned acrobats. Behind his piano, guitar and melodica, Batiste directed an energy that was both ecstatic and exacting.

The show’s heartbeat ran through the lineage of American music. Batiste conjured Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley in some moments; Herbie Hancock or Sly Stone in others.

At all points, he was unequivocally himself.

But this show also pulsed with something much deeper, ancestral and uncontainable; a sonic language that stretched from the Congo to the Mississippi to the Appalachians. It was the audience’s job to keep up.

“We Are” and “Symphony No. 5 in Congo Square” hit early, the latter an inspired mash-up of Beethoven and Big Easy second-line swing. “Lean On My Love,” sung in duet with guest vocalist Andra Day, rode a lilting calypso groove before freewheeling into a medley of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1,000 Dances” and The Impressions’ “It’s All Right.”

Throughout the night, Batiste fused genres with fearless joy. “Big Money” built around the mantra, “If we could just get past this one thing…” before briefly detouring into Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

“Petrichor” followed—a luminous moment pairing Senegalese rhythms with Appalachian fiddle lines, capped by a jubilant percussion break that felt like a cross-cultural body blow.

That we were treated to djembefola Weedie Braimah—another surprise guest who splits time between N’awlins and Northeast Ohio as an associate professor at Oberlin Conservatory of Music—in that mix, too?

Downright stunning.

The night’s most gut-punching moment came with “Cry,” a swampy boogie that exploded into a storm of soul, Batiste howling at the keys while his saxophonist tore into a solo that felt like a prayer for the nation’s grief—a hymn for immigrants and against wrongful imprisonments and indifference.

Batiste later stripped everything down for what he called his “Piano Moment,” a medley that folded the traditional “Blessed Redeemer,” Arlen & Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” into a hushed meditation on melody, memory and grace.

By the time he slid into “I Need You / Night Time,” introducing each band member with a pastor’s warmth, the Civic felt like a full-on congregation.

Then came the encore—a joyous three-part exclamation point that summed up everything Batiste stands for. He began with a medley that wove Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” “When the Saints Go Marching In” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into a tender singalong before easing into “Butterfly.”

From there, “Worship” became both noun and verb and the interactive “Loveriot” lived up to its name: a cacophonous espirit de (drum) corps breakdown — which spilled from stage to aisles and out into Akron’s autumn chill with a conga line of believers in tow.

If your dream in life ever included the line “Oh how I want to be in that number” when the saints were to go marching in, Batiste & Co. made it so.

It was revival and riot, church and carnival, a love letter to freedom itself. He wasn’t preaching from a pulpit, he was testifying.

If there was one misstep, it wasn’t musical—it was visual, specifically in the set design. The relentless strobe lighting throughout much of the performance made it feel like being caught in a wash of flash photography. With all that was unfolding on stage, the spectacle didn’t need the distraction.

Still, that was a minor quibble in a night that felt utterly redemptive. Batiste—singer, pianist, saxophonist, composer, bandleader—conducted not just a band but a community.

The Civic pulsed with the sound of people believing in something together, even if only for a couple of hours

“This is the circus of love,” his declaration read above the stage. “Under our tent, there is revival and joy.”

And joy, on this Akron night, was in no short supply.