Jon Batiste Brings the Joy to Forest Hills Stadium
There are performers you go to see, and there are performers who seem to go looking for you — off the stage, up the aisle, into the crowd, refusing to let the fourth wall stand. Jon Batiste is emphatically the second kind, which is exactly why his Saturday, Aug 15 show at Forest Hills Stadium, with Cautious Clay in support, feels less like a concert booking and more like a dare aimed at 14,000 Queens residents: try to sit still.
For anyone who spent 2015 to 2022 with a television on, Batiste is a familiar face — the grinning bandleader of Stay Human on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, playing America to sleep every weeknight. But the résumé runs deeper and stranger than late-night host-whisperer. In 2021 he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Pixar's Soul, sharing the Oscar with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — a jazz pianist from Kenner, Louisiana, standing on the same stage as the guy from Nine Inch Nails. Then, at the 2022 Grammys, his album We Are took Album of the Year, part of a five-win night out of eleven nominations. He is, by any accounting, one of the most decorated musicians of his generation, and one of the least interested in acting like it.
What makes a Batiste show worth the trip to the West Side Tennis Club is that all those trophies buy him exactly nothing on stage — he still plays like a man auditioning for the block party. His albums map the range: We Are, the genre-blurring statement that won the big one; World Music Radio (2023), a sprawling concept record with guests from Lana Del Rey to Lil Wayne to NewJeans; the piano reveries of Beethoven Blues (2024); and 2025's Big Money, which shoulders its way through blues, R&B and classic rock like it's daring you to file it under one heading. Live, those threads don't sit in tidy sections. They collide. A ballad detours into gospel, a groove opens into a New Orleans second-line, the melodica comes out, and somewhere in there the whole stadium is on its feet whether it planned to be or not.
The setting sharpens all of it. Forest Hills Stadium, tucked into the Tudor streets of the West Side Tennis Club, is one of the great accidental music rooms in America — a horseshoe of concrete that has hosted, across its long life, the biggest names in twentieth-century sound before its modern revival as a summer concert destination. It is open-air, intimate for its size, and acoustically forgiving in a way that suits a performer who treats spontaneity as a feature rather than a risk. Put a joy-first bandleader in a stadium built for rallies of a different kind, and the architecture does half the work.
Opener Cautious Clay is a canny match — the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter shares Batiste's refusal to pick a lane, sliding between R&B, folk and jazz-inflected pop, and his flute-forward, texture-rich sets should warm the room without stealing the thesis.
Here is the honest pitch. In a summer stacked with bass drops and legacy-act nostalgia, a Batiste show is a different animal: communal, unpredictable, and genuinely, almost aggressively hopeful. He has said his mission is to remind people they're alive, and he tends to make good on it. On a mid-August Saturday in Queens, under an open sky and a century of stadium history, that is worth the price of the ticket and the long walk back to the 71st Avenue platform, ears ringing, grinning like a fool. Go get some joy. It's in stock this weekend.
Sources: Forest Hills Stadium — Songkick; Jon Batiste — Wikipedia