Suleika Jaouad & Jon Batiste: Healing from Cancer through Music

About the Video

“Oncology wards, more than anywhere else I know, are music-less places,” wrote Suleika Jaouad as part of Life, Interrupted, the Emmy award-winning New York Times column and video series she wrote while hospitalized for leukemia shortly after graduating from Princeton University in 2010. Jon Batiste changed that by bringing his band to visit her oncology ward, “its inhabitants rejoicing in a temporary timeout, losing themselves to the beauty and healing power of music.” Now married, the New York Times bestselling author and multiple Grammy Award-winning musician together appeared as part of Princeton University Concerts’ “Healing with Music” series in a conversation, moderated by journalist Deborah Amos, permeated by live performance of works meaningful to Suleika’s recovery, about music’s role through illness and how they have managed to convert isolation into art.