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When Louis Cato was growing up in Albemarle, some buddies from a church youth group would drop by for jam sessions in the Cato family basement. The teens strayed more than once from church-approved melodies to tunes Louis hadn’t heard before. A few notes in, he recalls, a voice would pierce through the guitars.
“Mr. Cato,” his mom, a church pianist, would call from the top of the stairs. “Is that Jesus music?”
Darlene Tucker allowed only Christian music at home. But she supported her son’s musical endeavors practically from the moment he stepped out of the crib. It was her idea to buy him a drum set with paper heads—when he was 2. “He played those drums every single day,” she says. They ruptured before his third birthday, but she had purchased extra drumheads so her little boy could keep going.
He kept going, and going—from small-town North Carolina to one of the nation’s leading music colleges; to the bustle of tours and studio dates; to a coveted role on national network television. Cato, 38, bursts onto television screens each weeknight as the bandleader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He’s been a member since Colbert replaced David Letterman in 2015 but took over as leader in August 2022 after the departure of singer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Jon Batiste.
“Louis has done a great job this summer, and he is very humble, so he won’t say this, but I will: He’s a musical genius,” Colbert announced to his studio audience. “He can play basically every instrument on that stand over there. Give him an afternoon, he’ll learn how to play Mozart on a shoehorn.”
He hasn’t quite managed that yet, although he has recorded with Mariah Carey and John Legend, developed a producer’s prowess, and mastered guitar, bass, drums, trombone, tuba, even euphonium. When we speak over Zoom in November, Cato’s still trying to make sense of the twists of fate, ambition, and talent that delivered him from a small city 40 miles east of Charlotte to one of the biggest stages in entertainment. “‘Surreal’ is the word,” he says. “It’s so far outside of anything I imagined growing up in Albemarle.”
Cato was born in Lisbon, Portugal, where his father, William, was stationed as an Air Force officer. He was 3 months old when the family returned to the States, and the Catos eventually settled in Albemarle because William’s parents lived nearby. William worked as an administrator at Stanly Community College, and Darlene was mainly a homemaker.
When Louis was 8, he learned another instrument to match the drums. William brought home a guitar from a yard sale. It was missing some strings, but Louis began to explore melodies and bass lines. William bought him an electric bass for his ninth birthday. He played trombone in middle school. His proficiency grew. His high school band director, Chris Crumley, gave him a brochure for Berklee College of Music in Boston. Berklee awarded Louis a partial scholarship, and he enrolled in fall 2003.
Soon, he was busy with gigs and studio sessions in Boston. Cato laughs about the advantage he had over his competitors. He says producers realized, “You can call this guy instead of hiring four or five guys. And he’s, like, 18, so we don’t have to pay him that much.” Through one of his music teachers at Berklee, he met music producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist Jack DeBoe, now a music producer on The Late Show. “I just gravitated towards his warmth and joy,” DeBoe recalls.
After two semesters at Berklee, Cato decided he could learn and earn a living without incurring more school debt. He wasn’t just thinking about himself. At 19, he was going to be a father to the first of his two daughters.
Cato went to work as a touring musician with bassist Marcus Miller, guitarist John Scofield, singer Bobby McFerrin, and the band Snarky Puppy. From Miller, he absorbed his first lessons on how to lead a band. Marcus was playing bass “but headlining all these major jazz festivals,” Cato says, “and directing traffic, leading the energy, dictating the flow of a performance between the audience and the band, and connecting all those worlds while expressing what he had to express. I learned a great deal from that.”
Two moments upended Cato’s life. He was traveling in Switzerland with Miller in late 2012 when the tour bus overturned, killing the driver. The accident broke Cato’s back in two places, and recovery took months. He was active but still recuperating a couple of years later when he got a call from Batiste, who had heard Cato play but never met him. Would he come to New York to help with music for a TV show?
Cato recalls that Batiste was a little vague about what he wanted Cato to do. Cato decided to make the time for a session that produced “Humanism,” The Late Show’s opening theme. Cato played most of the instruments and assisted with production, and Batiste asked him to join his band, Stay Human, which would become the show’s house band. It didn’t take long for Cato to accept. He earned a good living on tour. It was a chance to learn, though, and to stay in one place for at least 40 weeks a year.
During tapings, Cato helps guide the band and audience through the warm-up comics, mini-jams during commercial breaks, and banter—”this whole reciprocal emotional tango that is our show,” he says. Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS ©2023 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Cato settled in as a band member and music producer, handling prerecorded tracks for parodies and other segments. Over the next seven years, he saw Batiste emerge as a star: flamboyantly dressed, boyishly exuberant, the scion of a New Orleans music dynasty, owner of five Grammys and an Oscar. Cato hasn’t attained that stature yet, although he does have a credit on Miller’s Grammy-nominated 2015 album Afrodeezia. He’s not quite the showman Batiste is—few are—and a few grumblers have taken to social media to complain that Cato lacks rapport with the host.
But viewers shouldn’t assume his subtler approach betrays a lack of depth and intensity, friends say. Music “comes from a place of human connection” for him, says singer-songwriter Megan Burtt, whom Cato has produced. Cato “doesn’t want to have surface-level conversations. He has to find that thread of humanity and emotion and intimacy.”
After Batiste announced his departure, Cato looked for a thread or two in Colbert’s long comedy career. “I don’t know if I’ve even told him this,” he says, “but I looked up a bunch of footage of him at Second City in Chicago with Steve Carell and Paul Dinello—any skits I could find.” He watched Strangers with Candy, the Comedy Central series Colbert co-created, and combed YouTube for clips he thought might acclimate him to Colbert’s improv style. A few weeks later, Cato had dinner with Colbert. The host encouraged his new music director to just be himself onstage. Cato thought, Well, I’ve been at this completely backwards. Then another thought took its place: What a gift.
Jack DeBoe says Cato, after more than a year as bandleader, is coming into his own. “We’re just starting to see a different side of Louis now that he’s in this position,” DeBoe says. “He has spent several years being a sideman and helping to elevate the sound and performance of whoever he’s backing up, whoever the lead artist is. Now we’re just starting to see him tap into a new side of his personality.”
That side is emerging on the show, where Cato prepares by creating set lists and demos, conducting rehearsals and sound checks, and planning for guests. For tapings, the band warms up the audience with interactions that TV viewers don’t get to see: upbeat songs and banter beforehand and mini-sets during commercial breaks, Cato says—“this whole reciprocal emotional tango that is our show.”
In August, Cato released his second solo album, Reflections, on which he plays everything from electric guitar to mouth percussion. The lyrics are candid. In “Someday You’ll Understand,” he sings about a relationship in which vows were exchanged, but “it wasn’t built to last. … All in all, it’s my fault, too. ’Cause I fell out of love with you.”
Cato released his second solo album, Reflections, in August. Courtesy, sacksco.com
He’s no longer married, although he says he and his ex have a healthy co-parenting relationship. The personal struggle comes through in his new music. “My first album (Starting Now in 2017) was before therapy,” he acknowledges, “and the second album was after.”
We’re nearing the end of our Zoom call, and I’m struck by Cato’s honesty about his personal life and his humility in talking to someone from “back home”; not a shred of “I’m big-time now” creeps into our conversation. When I mention that his school principal says hello, he exclaims, “Miss Rogers?” I tell him my husband, Alan Tobias, is a former trombonist for the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, and he seems genuinely interested. I ask Cato if he ever studied with a former colleague of my husband’s, a tuba player. He says no. “That,” he adds, “would have been beyond my wildest dreams when I was there.”
No more. We’ve gone past our planned time, and Cato realizes he needs to be at rehearsal in five minutes. Fortunately, he lives just down the street, in midtown Manhattan. He tells me he’s glad he has a scooter, says goodbye, then darts off to the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway.
ANDREA COOPER is a writer in Charlotte.
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