Jonathan Michael Batiste was born in Metairie, Louisiana, on November 11, 1986, and grew up in nearby Kenner. His family is one of New Orleans's musical dynasties: Lionel Batiste played with the Treme Brass Band, Milton Batiste with the Olympia Brass Band, and Russell Batiste Jr. is a drummer. At eight he played percussion and drums in the family's Batiste Brothers Band. At eleven, on his mother's suggestion, he moved to the piano and took classical lessons every Saturday for seven years with a local teacher, Shirley Herstein. He filled in the rest by ear, transcribing video-game music from Street Fighter Alpha, Final Fantasy VII and Sonic the Hedgehog, and he has named the Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu as one of his earliest inspirations. He attended St. Augustine High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where Trombone Shorty was a schoolmate, and graduated in 2004.

He then went to the Juilliard School, which awarded him a Bachelor of Music in 2008 and a Master of Music in 2011, both in jazz studies. He had already begun releasing records: Times in New Orleans came out in 2005 and the trio set Live in New York: At the Rubin Museum of Art in 2006, both self-released. In 2005 he started playing around New York with Juilliard classmates, bassist Phil Kuehn and drummer Joe Saylor, later adding Eddie Barbash on alto saxophone and Ibanda Ruhumbika on tuba. He called the group Stay Human, after the idea that live, face-to-face music can counter the "plug in, tune out" habits of modern life, and the band took its music into the street in unannounced performances he calls "love riots." Their 2011 EP MY N.Y. was recorded entirely on New York subway trains. He also worked as a sideman: he is the pianist in Cassandra Wilson's regular band on her Blue Note album Silver Pony (2010), and he has recorded and performed with Roy Hargrove and played with Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Television noticed him early. He appears as himself in seasons two through four of HBO's Treme, and in Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer (2012) he played the role of T.K. Hazelton and composed and performed the Hammond B-3 organ music.

Social Music (Razor & Tie and Concord, October 15, 2013), credited to Jon Batiste and Stay Human, reached No. 1 on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart. The Music of John Lewis (Blue Engine, released March 24, 2017), credited to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Batiste, reached No. 3 on the Jazz Albums chart. On June 4, 2015, CBS announced that Batiste and Stay Human would be the house band for the new Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which premiered on September 8, 2015. For seven years he was the show's bandleader and musical director, a jazz-trained pianist leading a nightly network-television band. In 2018 he released Hollywood Africans on Verve, followed by two live albums recorded at the Village Vanguard, Anatomy of Angels (August 2, 2019) and Chronology of a Dream (November 1, 2019). The second was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. In 2019 his version of "St. James Infirmary Blues" was nominated for a Grammy for Best American Roots Performance.

The work that made him known beyond jazz audiences came in 2020 and 2021. For Pixar's Soul, Batiste wrote the jazz music for the film's New York scenes, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored the otherworldly Great Before sequences. He has said he wanted jazz that sounded authentic and was accessible to all ages, and the sessions drew on advice from Herbie Hancock, Terri Lyne Carrington and Questlove. The three composers shared the Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA for the score, and the Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. Batiste's Oscar made him the second Black composer to win Best Original Score, after Hancock in 1987. In the same stretch he made Meditations with the guitarist Cory Wong (May 29, 2020), the collaborative set Swing States with Regina Carter, John Daversa and Harvey Mason (July 13, 2020), and took part in a Juneteenth day of marches and performances in Brooklyn after the killing of George Floyd. We Are (Verve, March 19, 2021), which he has described as genreless music built around story, draws on gospel, funk and R&B, with the St. Augustine High School Marching 100 on the title single and guests including Mavis Staples, Zadie Smith, PJ Morton and Trombone Shorty. At the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in April 2022 he led all artists with eleven nominations and won five: Album of the Year for We Are, Best Music Video for "Freedom," Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song for "Cry," and Best Score Soundtrack for Soul.

Colbert announced on August 11, 2022, that Batiste would not be returning to the Late Show, saying he wanted to pursue other personal and professional interests, and Louis Cato took over the band on September 6. Batiste conducted the premiere of his orchestral piece American Symphony at Carnegie Hall on September 22, 2022. Matthew Heineman's documentary American Symphony, released by Netflix on November 29, 2023, follows the composition of that work during the year his wife, the writer and musician Suleika Jaouad, faced a return of her leukemia; its song "It Never Went Away" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards the song won Best Song Written for Visual Media and the film won Best Music Film. World Music Radio (Verve and Interscope, August 18, 2023), a concept album framed as broadcasts from an interstellar radio host, featured Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne, NewJeans, JID, Camilo, Jon Bellion, Fireboy DML and Kenny G, and earned an Album of the Year nomination at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, along with a Record of the Year nomination for "Worship." In 2024 he played his first headlining tour, the Uneasy Tour, and in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman's film about the first episode of Saturday Night Live, he played Billy Preston and wrote the score.

He returned to the piano in 2024 with Beethoven Blues (Verve, November 15, 2024), the first of a solo series he calls the Batiste Piano Series, which recasts Beethoven with blues and gospel feeling. In February 2025 he sang the national anthem at Super Bowl LIX, accompanied by the deaf actress Stephanie Nogueras signing in American Sign Language. Big Money (Verve and Interscope, August 22, 2025), a set of blues, R&B, folk and classic-rock songs with Andra Day, No I.D. and Randy Newman, won the Grammy for Best Americana Album at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in early 2026. By the Recording Academy's count he has won eight Grammys from twenty-five nominations. When the Late Show ended its run on May 21, 2026, Batiste came back to the Ed Sullivan Theater for the finale, joining Cato, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney. In August 2026 he released three more installments of the piano series: Black Mozart, Monk Meditations and Monk Movements, the last two built on the compositions of Thelonious Monk. He holds honorary doctorates from Brown University (2025) and Columbia University (2026).

Batiste is a pianist first, trained through family music in New Orleans, seven years of classical lessons and jazz studies at Juilliard. He does not use the word jazz in a narrow sense: he has told Forbes that the term does not capture the intellectual breadth of what it points to, and he calls much of his own work genreless. The listed influences are wide: Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, Louis Armstrong, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Miles Davis and Django Reinhardt. For Soul he cited Roy Haynes, Harvey Mason, Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Charlie Parker and the Headhunters as the sound he wanted to honor.

His commercial profile rests on the pop, soul and television sides of his career, and the record says so plainly. We Are and World Music Radio are pop and R&B albums with rap, gospel and global-pop guests, "Freedom" and "Cry" won in video and roots categories rather than jazz ones, and his best-known job was a nightly network talk-show band. The jazz side is real and documented, though: the Juilliard degrees, the Village Vanguard live albums, the Lincoln Center collaborations, the sideman work with Cassandra Wilson, the jazz music written for Soul, and the 2026 Monk albums. AP coverage in 2022 described him as co-creative director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. The through line between those worlds is improvisation in front of an audience: the street performances with Stay Human, and the solo shows billed as STREAMS: Jon Batiste at the Piano, where he improvises on piano and melodica.

Critical response to the pop records has been divided. Pitchfork found World Music Radio too broad to say anything specific about the cultures it samples, and The Guardian called its songs hooky while asking what Batiste himself brings to them. The Associated Press, by contrast, praised the stripped-down, mostly acoustic sound of Big Money. He has told the New York Times that Beethoven's music is full of polyrhythms and carries a feeling he hears as the blues, which is the premise of Beethoven Blues.