Terence Blanchard
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Terence Blanchard
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Bio
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Composer and renowned trumpet player Terence Blanchard has been a consistent artistic force for making powerful musical statements concerning painful American tragedies-- past and present.
Terence is unique in the jazz world as an artist whose creative endeavors go far beyond the genre into film scoring, crafting television series soundscapes and conceiving grand operas that have been recognized at the highest levels of art appreciation. In addition, Blanchard has been at the forefront of giving voice in his works to socio-cultural issues and racial injustices of our time. “Like anybody else, I like to play feel-good party music, but sometimes my music is about the reality of where we are,” says Blanchard who today lives in Los Angeles as well as in his native New Orleans. “I’m just trying to speak the truth.”
Born in New Orleans in 1962, Blanchard began playing piano at the age of 5. He added trumpet three years later. In summer music camps, he became friends with Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis. After a teenage stint touring with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, in 1982 Wynton recommended him to take his place in Art Blakley’s Jazz Messengers. Blanchard joined and served until 1986 as the band’s music director—the same role Shorter, the band’s primary composer, filled from 1959-1963. While Blanchard continued to be a Jazz Messenger until 1990, he and fellow band member Donald Harrison formed a quintet that recorded seven albums for different labels. Blanchard began his solo career at CBS Records with his 1991 eponymous album. At the same time, he began working with Spike Lee, first performing on the soundtracks to Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues. Blanchard’s score for Jungle Fever in 1991 marked the beginning of the long-standing collaboration. Blanchard was nominated for a best score Oscar for Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman and 2020’s Da 5 Bloods. He became the second African-American composers nominated twice in the category—duplicating Quincy Jones’ honors for In Cold Blood in 1967 and The Color Purple in 1985. While Blanchard says he and Lee have lost count of how many projects they’ve worked on together, it’s estimated to be in the range of twenty, including 17 films and three television projects. Beside working with Lee, Blanchard composed music for two Kasi Lemmons films (1997’s Eve’s Bayou and 2019’s Harriet), Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Broadway play The Motherfucker with the Hat (2011), George Lucas’s film Red Tails (2012), the 2012 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, and the 2021 National Geographic limited series Genius: Aretha. In 2020, he contributed to the HBO television revival of the Perry Mason series, working with director Tim Van Patten. The center of gravity to all Blanchard’s works is the undergirding of his beautiful, provocative, inspiring jazz recordings. The same holds true now as it did early in his career in 1994 when he told DownBeat: “Writing for film is fun, but nothing can beat being a jazz musician, playing a club, playing a concert.”
