Review: Jon Batiste’s Circus of Love brings joy and healing music to St. Paul

You might have heard that Jon Batiste, the former bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” has collected a bunch of Grammys and an Oscar. You probably didn’t know that he’s become a self-ordained minister in the imaginary Church of Love.

Being an ecumenical kind of guy, Batiste hoisted a banner at the sold-out Palace Theatre in St. Paul Saturday night declaring “The Circus of Love,” adding “under our tent there is revival & joy.”

Call it a circus or a church, whatever it was was an exhilarating, uplifting and exhausting evening of deep musicality, heartfelt spirituality and contagious joy.

There was love in the air. How could there not be when Batiste shared his gifts as a ravenously talented musician and inspired preacher of l-o-v-e?

“This is not a performance,” said the Juilliard-trained classical pianist from a prominent New Orleans jazz family. “It’s a spiritual practice.” Spoken like a true minister.

If it had been a performance, you might say the 2½ hours were oddly paced. The evening opened with “Let God Lead” featuring Batiste on tambourine with his nine-member band. It was impossible to resist this spiritual funk delivered by a charismatic leader with an infectious smile.

Then suddenly the band was gone and Batiste did a little preaching about healing melodies before launching into solo piano time. First, he demonstrated his classical prowess, then slyly inserted a taste of Prince’s “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” and moved into his mashup of Beethoven and his own “5th Symphony In Congo Square.”

From 2023’s “World Music Radio” came “Raindance” and “Worship,” which featured the repeated refrain “we are born the same.” Batiste finds joy in repetition, showing a propensity Saturday for getting lost in enthralling elongation spiked with repeated phrases.

Batiste, 38, came across like a mission-focused maestro bitten by the spirit of love. He preached his non-Biblical sayings periodically between songs, but it wasn’t anything scripted. He was in “the flow of the moment,” as he said.

The audience was fully engaged, whether responding to his sermonizing, singing choruses with the bandleader or dancing to the funky grooves. And there were plenty of those.

The spiritual funk “We Are,” the title track of Batiste’s 2021 album of the year at the Grammys, earned one of the night’s longest ovations. “Freedom,” also from that album, saw the rubber-legged Batiste cutting loose with celebrative joy.

He followed that with “Big Money,” teaching the crowd specific dance moves for the song about “not selling your soul for gold and silver.” But the music maven couldn’t stop there, so his band segued into a jazzy/bluesy, violin-buoyed interpretation of the nursery rhyme phrase “the cow jumped over the moon.”

Leave it to Day to get things back on track. She started sermonizing about empathy and letting “music transform you,” which is exactly what she did with “Rise Up,” her 2015 Grammy-winning hit. That determination, that surge, those churchy, goosebump-inducing vocal runs. Amen! We needed more than two selections from the remarkably soulful Day.

Batiste’s sweet, child-like “Butterfly” was the perfect benediction after a long night, but he wasn’t done. It was time for the tent revival rave-up “I Need You” featuring the Etta James-evoking vocals of Desiree Washington.

The crowd thought the night would end when Batiste downshifted for an imaginative solo piano reading of “Pure Imagination,” the “Willy Wonka” tune. No, because it was time to turn the Circus of Love into a second-line New Orleans celebration as Batiste, on melodica, and troupe paraded through the Palace Theatre, including the balcony, performing “You Are My Sunshine,” repeating the refrain over and over for 13 minutes.

That’s how Batiste ministers love.