Age: 39
male
Jonathan Michael Batiste (born November 11, 1986) is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, composer, and television personality. He has recorded and performed with artists including Stevie Wonder, Prince, Willie Nelson, Lenny Kravitz, Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey, Roy Hargrove, Juvenile, and Mavis Staples. Batiste, with his band Stay Human, appeared nightly as bandleader and musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from 2015 to 2022. Batiste also serves as the music director of The Atlantic and the Creative Director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. In 2020, he co-composed the score for the Pixar animated film Soul, for which he received an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Grammy Award and a BAFTA Film Award (all shared with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). Batiste has garnered 5 Grammy Awards from 14 nominations, including an Album of the Year win for his album We Are (2021). In 2023, Batiste featured in the documentary film American Symphony which records the process of Batiste composing his first symphony.
Coonskin is a 1975 American adult animated satirical crime film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film references the Uncle Remus folk tales and satirizes the blaxploitation film genre as well as Disney's racially controversial film Song of the South, also adapted from the Uncle Remus folk tales. The film's narrative concerns three anthropomorphic Uncle Remus characters, Br'er Rabbit (referred to as Brother Rabbit), Br'er Fox (referred to as Preacher Fox), and Br'er Bear (referred to as Brother Bear). They rise to the top of the organized crime racket in Harlem, encountering corrupt law enforcement, con artists, and the Mafia, in a satire of both racism within the Hollywood film system, and America itself. Originally produced under the titles Harlem Nights and Coonskin No More... at Paramount Pictures, Coonskin encountered controversy before its original theatrical release when the Congress of Racial Equality accused the film of being racist. When the film was released, Bryanston gave it limited distribution and it initially received mixed reviews. Later re-released under the titles Bustin' Out and Street Fight, Coonskin has since been re-appraised, recontextualizing the film as the condemnation of racism that the director intended, rather than a product of a racist imagination, as its detractors had claimed.
