Michelle Obama reveals piano skills in playful ‘Charlie Brown’ duet with Jon Batiste
9 May 2024, 16:57 | Updated: 9 May 2024, 17:15
The former first lady joined star musician Jon Batiste at the keys for a nostalgic duet...
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Michelle Obama, attorney, author, and former first lady of the United States, joined singer-songwriter Jon Batiste at the piano keyboard for a heartwarming, shared moment of music.
The pair met following the release of Batiste’s Oscar-nominated documentary, American Symphony, which followed the composer and pianist’s astronomical musical career alongside a turbulent time in his personal life following his wife’s leukaemia diagnosis.
“Well, you know, life is everything all at once,” Batiste tells Obama. “We have to be thankful that we are still living life.”
Sat together at a grand piano, Batiste effortlessly begins to improvise on the keyboard, accenting their conversation with smooth blues chords and lyrical riffs.
“I know you know something about piano!” Batiste prompts the former first lady.
“There’s one song I sort of remember,” Michelle Obama says, before launching into the playful bass motif of Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Linus and Lucy’, written for the beloved Peanuts film franchise.
Batiste joins gleefully with the melody, reacting with surprise at Obama’s piano prowess.
Read more: When Pavarotti and Tracy Chapman stunned the world in a soulful operatic duet
Jon Batiste and Michelle Obama talk how they learned piano
“I learned to play on a piano with broken keys,” Obama tells her duet partner. “And the only way I knew ‘middle C’ was that it was chipped.”
Batiste replies, “I love that story so much. It’s such an allegory for the world. Things won’t be perfect but you know that chip, that crack, is where the light gets in.”
Obama also asked Batiste about his own beginnings in music: “How did you become this musical genius?”
“I started learning just from my family and friends in the neighbourhood,” Batiste answered. “I started learning just from my family and friends in the neighbourhood.
“I didn’t think about music as a profession. It was just something that we did, as a way for us to gather. And then I started to learn all these sounds – classical music, you know...”
His piano meanderings transform elegantly into the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata: “It was one of those things that I could step into a world and I could escape.
“And then I learned that you could take that world, and you could shape it in your own way.”
Read more: Toddler moved to tears hearing his sister play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on piano
Michelle Obama may also have let slip the existence of a rare musical talent.
As Batiste asks her about her own musical upbringing, he challenges her to find middle C on the keyboard in front of them.
Obama duly obliges – but just before she presses the piano key, she hums a just-about-audible note, a perfect match to the middle C she plays only seconds later.
It’s estimated that only one in 10,000 people have perfect pitch. Could former first lady Michelle Obama be one of them?
