Award-Winning Composer And Musician Jon Batiste Talks Ocarina Of Time’s Music And Why ‘Guile’s Theme’ Goes With Everything
Jon Batiste is the award-winning composer and musician behind the music of ‘Ocarina Of Time’ and he has told us about his role in the game, how he came up with ‘Guile’s Theme’, and why it fits in with anything.
Jon Batiste has worked with everyone from Alicia Keys to Lenny Kravitz, Prince to Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson and more. He played the national anthem at Super Bowl LIX. He’s headed up the musical efforts of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He has won more awards than we can list in this article—earling eight Grammy awards, as well as an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Golden Globe (the list goes on). However, as I sit down with Batiste for a short discussion about video game music, his energy goes over the Zoom call.
Even before I can ask a question, Batiste starts singing to greet me, and nerding about my NBA Jam and Street Fighter II cabinets. He starts to sing the menu tune from the NBA Jam and remembers all the quarters he put into his local Street Fighter cabinet. A lifelong gamer who began in his native Louisiana and went on to study at the Juilliard School, his compositions have been inspired by games such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy VII, and he has been playing games for nearly 30 years. Once you have watched enough of the video game music performances on social media, you’ll soon see videos of Batiste with famed Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu or performing gaming music.
With The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time delivering some of the most iconic music of all time (and Batiste famously loving the music), it makes sense that Nintendo would bring him out to New York to serve as a special guest at the launch event for the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on Switch 2. I got a few minutes to chat with Batiste about his passion for video game music, his background with Nintendo and how “Guile’s Theme” from Street Fighter II is just so perfect with everything.
One of the reasons Ocarina of Time is so special is the music, and this game is undoubtedly one of the most important video games of all time. What’s your favorite thing about Ocarina of Time, sonically?
First of all, if you’re looking for super inside baseball, music nerdery, I enjoy doing this, in the compositions, there’s a way that major chords and minor chords in what? No sevenths, just root, third and fifth. They alternate and it creates this magic, which is, like, it’s wistful, and it’s simple. It feels ancient, and it feels like it’s the music that is going on in your mind as you’re generating thoughts and your imagination is churning. And the major chords are happening just after the minors in this contrary motion that’s happening, so it feels like the music is going like this: It’s going up – major, minor – like [sings the main Legend of Zelda theme song].
It is expanding and contracting, so it’s a musical allegory for the expansion and the openness of the world that Link is in. The music’s power, is what I think is it, it’s like [Koji Kondo] is able to capture the essence of the gameplay, but also the essence of magic and simplicity, which is what I think makes it… So, you could listen to the music in the game, and you could also listen to it apart from the game and experience that magic.
What tracks of Ocarina of Time are considered the best musically or compositionally?
Oh man. Well, I think of it as a suite, so that’s what makes it actually… there’s nothing that’s more or less complex, but the thought to figure out how to make all of the themes be interrelated yet singular. Like that’s one of my favorites, “Song of Storms”. So I enjoy playing it. I love to play many of the themes. I was raised in that way! I would join in with playing the game, and then I would go to an instrument. After playing hours on Nintendo we’d then go and play Nintendo on piano! There, it was kind of a compromise, wasn’t it? I started doing this around 11.I began at age 11.
If you go back to that 11-year-old Jon, how do you remember your childhood in general?
Well, I’ve been playing with Nintendo since the NES. Christmas morning. Duck Hunt. You remember that? Perhaps my first game I played. No, it was the first game I ever played; Donkey Kong, then Duck Hunt, then Super Mario Bros. Staples! We’re in the early ’90’s. I had a room, it was my room I would go to – it was my territory – we had this blue shag carpet and I would sit in that room, and I would basically disappear over there, playing Nintendo for hours and hours.
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And my mind is kind of… my mind can become a spiral; it can become a tornado. But even then I knew that when I went into this world of the game – and if I don’t win, it’s not about winning and losing – it helps to tidy up the cobwebs in my head, and it gives me ideas and inspiration. So that’s when I began to have an interest in Street Fighter II when I began playing more with my sister and cousins. But it was Yoko Shimomura, also who I met and worked with, writing amazing themes for every character and that’s when I truly fell in love with fighting games.
And then, we would play so many of the Street Fighter franchise. We would play a lot of Final Fight. There were a lot of things… Double Dragon, then Mega Man… all these different series. Mega Man X is [my] favorite game ever. Then, comes The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and that just widens this canon, and that’s expanding the canon, that’s adding the sort of linear effect to, like, a Donkey Kong or Super Mario World, that’s adding the score to the combat, that’s adding the world to it. Mind-blowing! So, that sort of solidified my palate in terms of my favorite type of game.
You said Street Fighter 2? There’s a meme about “Guile’s Theme” and its ability to go with anything. What makes this composition so effective at improving any video that it’s played with?
Wow! So, it has momentum in a way that is extremely [sings the melody of “Guile’s Theme”] … It draws you in, which is what you want [with] anything that you’re starting when you’re commencing a journey or watching something. You want to attract, say, that pulls you in as that call and response. But it’s an immediate announcement with the brass, and then the bass call and response. So it’s instantaneously giving you this feeling like something is going on, and I have to pay attention to it! So, that’s the first step, right there. And the tempo is really, it’s a great tempo! It almost has the feeling of the great themes from, like, an ’80s protagonist that’s in a fighting movie. I believe that was the type of the archetype. Yoko was probably referring to the same archetype, right? The action-hero archetype.