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Stories   >   Jon Batiste - We Are makes Florida Weekly's top 10 albums of 2021

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Jon Batiste - We Are makes Florida Weekly's top 10 albums of 2021

Posted: January 6, 2022

Florida Weekly's ALAN SCULLEY…..When 2021 began, the consensus seemed to be that this could be a special year for music. Artists had been home since early 2020, giving them an extended block of time to work on new music. For the most part, those expectations panned out. The new releases from Jon Batiste, Adele and Judith Hill immediately popped with album-of-the-year excellence. And if those albums made the top entries on my Top 10 Albums list easy to choose, the wealth of other very good albums made it tough to rank the next seven albums and decide which albums to leave off the honorable mention list. Here’s where I landed in picking the year’s best albums.

The latest album from Batiste has earned him 11 Grammy nominations, and this time the Grammy folks got things right. “We Are” is the best album of 2021, as Batiste shows he’s a master of soul and its various iterations. On “Cry,” he conjures thoughts of prime Al Green with a silky yet insistent groove and knockout melody. “Tell The Truth” is the kind of gritty funk-rocker that recalls Sly & the Family Stone and James Brown at their best. Batiste gets his gospel on with “I Need You,” a shaking and stomping tune that doesn’t need a choir to raise a ruckus, and flexes his jazz/classical chops on “Movement 11.” Then on “Whatchutalkinbout,” Batiste shows he can rap with the best of them, as he reels out rapid-fire verses to a snappy-as-it-gets jazzy beat. While well known in jazz circles, the Grammy recognition for “We Are” should propel Batiste to much wider popularity.

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