Jon Batiste is set to make his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra next Thursday, bringing a genre-hopping set of jazz, blues and symphonic music to Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls. The Grammy- and Oscar-winning pianist will perform tracks spanning his catalog, from Hollywood Africans and We Are to his latest release, Big Money, alongside a full orchestral rendition of his American Symphony under guest conductor Jonathan Taylor Rush.
Batiste said he is ready to blast off for the concert, describing it as a new and one-time-only performance that audiences may never hear again in quite the same form, according to Cleveland.com. The show is part of his ongoing A Fantastical Musical Journey tour, which previously stopped at Kansas City's Starlight Theatre, a performance Hoodline covered in an earlier report on his tour. He also brought a version of the tour, his Big Money tour, to the Akron Civic Theatre on October 26, 2025, per the same Cleveland.com account.
This marks Batiste's first appearance with the Cleveland Orchestra, and he'll share the stage with guest conductor Jonathan Taylor Rush, who is making his own Cleveland Orchestra debut. Rush previously served as Assistant and Associate Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 2020 to 2023 and was formerly a conducting fellow with the Chicago Sinfonietta, according to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
A Symphony Built From His Wife's Cancer Fight
Central to the evening will be Batiste's American Symphony, a piece the Cleveland.com report says he'll perform with the orchestra and Rush. The work premiered on September 22, 2022, at Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium as part of Batiste's Carnegie Hall Perspectives residency, featuring a 64-member ensemble that folded banjo, steel drums, Afro-Latin percussion and indigenous vocals into a traditional classical framework, according to Grammy.com.
The piece's creation became the subject of American Symphony, a 2023 Netflix documentary that depicts Batiste's creativity amid his wife's struggle with leukemia, per Cleveland.com. That film earned an Academy Award nomination and a Grammy Award for its original song, It Never Went Away, according to the GRAMMY Museum. Batiste has said all music is connected across time, and that he's particularly drawn to well-known musical works that have transcended their original time and place.
Bridging Improvisation And Strict Score
Batiste treats scores as launchpads or recipes rather than fixed instructions, a philosophy that sits in contrast with an orchestra that, as Cleveland.com notes, follows scores to the letter. He has said his musical differences with the orchestra are not very large, and the Blossom set may include improvisation layered atop the more rigorously notated symphonic material. Batiste, who holds jazz degrees from The Juilliard School, has said he and fellow musicians seek ways to unify people and called for a coalition of voices to show how connected people are.
He has framed the Blossom performance as an effort to bring people together and bridge divides, adding that Blossom Music Center welcomes children and multiple generations. Batiste said he has been in touch with Bruce Springsteen and Yo-Yo Ma, and Cleveland.com's report describes his connections through Western classical music as a thread tying him and the orchestra together despite their different backgrounds in New Orleans jazz, blues, R&B, film and television.
A Discography Full Of Awards
The show arrives amid a run of critical momentum for Batiste. At the 68th Grammy Awards in February 2026, he won Best Americana Album for Big Money, his ninth studio release, issued on August 22, 2025, and featuring collaborations with Andra Day, Randy Newman and No I.D., according to Grammy.com. He'll also draw from his piano series albums at Blossom, including tracks from Beethoven Blues, Black Mozart and Monk Meditations. Beethoven Blues, released via Verve Records and Interscope in November 2024, spent nine consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Classical Albums chart, per Universal Music Canada.
Batiste's résumé also includes a sweep at the 64th Grammy Awards in April 2022, when he was the most-nominated artist with 11 nods and won five awards, including Album of the Year for We Are, an album that drew heavily from his New Orleans upbringing, according to Newsweek. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for the Pixar film Soul in April 2021, sharing the honor with co-composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, per ABS-CBN. He is also a pianist and longtime bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Blossom's Long Run As A Summer Home
Blossom Music Center opened on July 19, 1968, under music director George Szell, who wanted a dedicated outdoor venue in the Cuyahoga Valley to provide year-round, 52-week employment for Cleveland Orchestra musicians, according to The Cleveland Orchestra. That opening night performance featured Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The venue's outdoor pavilion seats 5,700 people, with a general-admission lawn accommodating another 13,500 guests for a total capacity topping 19,000, and it sits on 800 acres surrounded by Cuyahoga Valley National Park, per the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Batiste's appearance lands within the Cleveland Orchestra's broader 2026 Blossom Music Festival season, which opened July 3 and runs through Labor Day weekend with a mix of core classical programs, film screenings with live accompaniment, and guest pop acts including Billy Idol, according to WKYC. Hoodline previously reported on the season's lineup in a piece detailing the summer doubleheader announcement, and other summer bookings have included touring rock acts, as covered in Hoodline's report on Chicago and Styx's Blossom stop, and a classical guest soloist featured in Hoodline's coverage of a 323-year-old Stradivarius performance.
Tickets And Show Details
Jon Batiste's concert with the Cleveland Orchestra is scheduled for next Thursday, August 20, at 7 p.m. at Blossom Music Center, 1145 W. Steels Corners Road in Cuyahoga Falls. Ticket prices range from $34 to $158, and tickets are available through clevelandorchestra.com or by calling 216-231-1111, according to Cleveland.com.
