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I'm Terry Gross.
Christmas has inspired some great songs in every genre and some really bad ones.
Today we'll hear some great ones.
We'll start with Jon Batiste at the piano, playing, singing and talking about some of his favorites.
It's part two of the session we recently recorded with him.
Batiste was the band leader and music director of the Late show with Stephen Colbert from its premiere in 2015 until 2022.
That same year, his album We Are received 11 Grammy nominations in seven different categories and won five Grammys, including album of the Year.
His new album, Beethoven Blues, features his reimaginings of Beethoven compositions.
He also wrote the score for this year's film Saturday Night about the first SNL broadcast, and he appears in the film as musician Billy Preston.
The first musical guest, a documentary about Batiste called American Symphony, is now nominated for a Grammy for best music film.
And Batiste is nominated for best song written for visual media.
Here's the interview.
So as we speak, Christmas is coming up soon.
And I don't know how you feel about Christmas music in my opinion, like, some of it is just, like, really fun.
Some of it is kind of transcendent and some of it is so irritating, causing, like the worst earworms and like, just like, please don't play that again.
I never want to hear that again.