Jon Batiste has long been a household name, thanks in large part to his star-making turn as the affably hip bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. That record’s hopeful message of community and shared humanity—set to a joyous blend of soul, jazz, funk, R&B, and hip-hop—offered an antidote to the emotional burnout of grappling with America’s festering socio-political fissures. Drawing from the rich cultural lineage of Black music as well as personal history—not only does Batiste come from New Orleans musical royalty, his grandfather was a union organizer—We Are’s fist-pumping positivity sounded vital and essential, even at its corniest.

Now Batiste wants to take his brand of musical activism international. For his sprawling new album, World Music Radio, he enlists a globe-spanning crew of collaborators for an ambitious experiment in planetary genre-blending. Their mission? To create pop music that so effortlessly transcends national, cultural, and genre barriers that it is, as the press release puts it, “meant for everyone.” If that sounds like the sort of money-printing holy grail modern music executives dream of, well, that’s because it sort of is. But for Batiste, it’s more about tapping into music’s power to find common ground between disparate—often divided—communities. If we can get kids in, say, Dhaka to jam to Latin trap and Catalonian folk, he seems to think, then maybe it will remind us that we are all, in the end, human.