Jon Batiste and Wife Suleika Had a 'Reputation' for Prank Calls During Her Cancer Hospitalization (Exclusive)

Jon Batiste and wife Suleika Jaouad open up to PEOPLE about their highs and lows as seen in their new Netflix documentary 'American Symphony'

In the face of one of the toughest challenges of their lives, Jon Batiste and his wife Suleika Jaouad found laughter to be the best medicine.

During her hospitalization amid a cancer recurrence, Batiste and Jaouad did their best to keep things light — and even earned themselves some good-humored notoriety among the staff.

“Whenever there’s a moment of laughter to be found, especially in the darkness, that’s what we’re gunning for,” Jaouad tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “We got a reputation for making prank calls in the hospital so much that the nurses started coming in and requesting us to prank their boyfriends and friends.”

Fans can see for themselves the way the Grammy-winning musician, 37, and his wife, 35, have put on a brave face in their new documentary American Symphony (streaming on Netflix Nov. 29), which paints a portrait of their lives leading up to the September 2022 debut of Batiste’s original symphony at Carnegie Hall.

The film, directed by Matt Heineman, was initially conceived as a way of documenting the creation of the symphony. But shortly after, the couple received news that the acute myeloid leukemia with which Jaouad was first diagnosed at 22 had returned, and that Batiste had been nominated for 11 Grammys, setting in motion a very different storyline than the one they’d originally planned.

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The result is an intimate depiction of a man doing his best to juggle the soaring highs of his career with the devastating lows of his personal life, and the ways in which love and art can heal.

“We’re both very private people, but more than that, especially with the illness piece, we didn’t know how the story was going to end,” says Jaouad, a journalist and author. “But that, for both of us, even though it wasn’t necessarily comfortable, was part of the appeal of telling our story this way. We wanted to show what it means to be in the trenches of uncertainty, to have to hold that duality of light — the astonishingly beautiful things that are happening and the astonishingly hard ones in the same palm.”

Adds Batiste: “It really is hard for me to watch it. But it’s very powerful the way it all came together.”

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Though there are plenty of difficult moments in the film, like the deep phone conversations Batiste has with his therapist, there are also lighter moments that showcase the couple’s humor. In one scene, Batiste visits his wife in the hospital and they take a walk down the hallway, blasting “Lean on Me” as they tease each other with a game of Simon Says.

“That’s us,” he says of the goofy dynamic.

It’s those moments that best illustrate what Jaouad hopes is the central message of American Symphony: in spite of circumstances, happiness and joy remains a choice.

“There are a lot of things that happen in life that can leave you down on your knees,” she says. “I want people to know that they have agency, that they have a voice about how they meet those difficult moments, be it with love or creativity or with your laughter.”

For more on Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.

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