Terence Blanchard

Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962) is an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He has also written two operas and more than 80 film and television scores. Blanchard has been nominated for two Academy Awards for Original Score for BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods (2020), both directed by Spike Lee, a frequent collaborator.

Blanchard started his career in 1980 playing in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while studying jazz at Rutgers University. In 1982, just before he turned 20, he dropped out of Rutgers to join The Jazz Messengers, launching a professional career now in its fifth decade. The Metropolitan Opera in New York staged Blanchard's opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones in its 2021–2022 season, the first opera by an African American composer in the organization's history.

Blanchard is also a passionate educational mentor. From 2000 to 2011, Blanchard served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2011, he was named artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami, and in 2015, he became a visiting scholar in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music. In 2019, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), named Blanchard to its Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, where he remained until 2023. In 2023, SFJAZZ announced the appointment of Blanchard as Executive Artistic Director. He leads the organization's artistic programming and guides its overall creative direction.

Blanchard was selected as the 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters.

Early life Blanchard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the only child of Wilhelmina and Joseph Oliver Blanchard. His father was a manager at an insurance company and an amateur opera singer.

Blanchard began playing piano at the age of five, and then at age eight, he switched to the trumpet after hearing Alvin Alcorn perform at his school. Blanchard played trumpet in summer music camps alongside his childhood friends, Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis.

Blanchard attended St. Augustine High School until transferring to John F. Kennedy High School so he could attend the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts where he studied under Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis. From 1980 to 1982, Blanchard studied under jazz saxophonist Paul Jeffrey and trumpeter Bill Fielder at Rutgers University.

Career

While at Rutgers University, Blanchard began touring with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. In 1982, Wynton Marsalis recommended Blanchard as his replacement in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Blakey would appoint Blanchard the band's musical director. Along with his New Orleans homeboy, Donald Harrison, Blanchard toured extensively and recorded five albums with the legendary band.

In 1986, Blanchard and Harrison left the Jazz Messengers to form their own quintet, featuring a rhythm section of young lions, Cyrus Chestnut, Rodney Whitaker, and drummer Carl Allen. The band influenced a new generation of young jazz musicians like Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, Geoff Keezer, and Roy Hargrove.

Blanchard has also composed for other directors, including Gina Prince-Bythewood, Regina King, Taylor Hackford, Ron Shelton, and Kasi Lemmons. Entertainment Weekly proclaimed Blanchard "central to a general resurgence of jazz composition for film."

Blanchard recorded several award-winning albums for Columbia Records, including Simply Stated (1992), The Malcolm X Jazz Suite (1993), In My Solitude: The Billie Holiday Songbook (1994), Romantic Defiance (1995), and The Heart Speaks (1996) featuring Ivan Lins, which was nominated for a Best Latin Jazz Performance Grammy Award.

In 1999, producer Peter Gelb signed Blanchard to the Sony Classical label and released Jazz In Film, which reunited Blanchard with Donald Harrison on three tracks. It also featured jazz legends Joe Henderson and Kenny Kirkland, both of whom died soon after the recording.

Blanchard's next album entitled, Wandering Moon (2000), scored him another Grammy nomination and the prestigious honor of Downbeat Magazine's Artist of the Year.

In 2001, Blanchard released his third and final album for Sony Classical entitled, Let's Get Lost. It featured arrangements of classic songs written by Jimmy McHugh performed by his quintet with guest vocalists Diana Krall, Jane Monheit, Dianne Reeves, and Cassandra Wilson. However, it was his instrumental only version of "Lost In A Fog" that got Blanchard another Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo.

In 2003, Blanchard signed with Blue Note Records and released Bounce produced by Michael Cuscuna. Two years later, legendary pianist Herbie Hancock produced Flow, garnering two more Grammy Award nominations.

In between the two Blue Note recordings, Blanchard was featured on McCoy Tyner's Illuminations with Gary Bartz, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash. The ensemble won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.

Blanchard was a judge for the fifth annual Independent Music Awards to support independent artists' careers.

In Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog, Blanchard performed all of the trumpet parts for the alligator character Louis. Blanchard also voiced the role of Earl the bandleader in the riverboat band.

Fifteen years later, Blanchard was invited to produce music for the theme park attraction Tiana's Bayou Adventure, which is inspired by The Princess and the Frog.

Blanchard made history when his Fire Shut Up in My Bones became the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, opening the company's 2021–22 season.

A year later, the Met premiered another Blanchard opera entitled, Champion, marking the first time since Richard Strauss that a living composer had two operas premiere in successive seasons.

Print biography

In 2002, Scarecrow Press, a member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, published Contemporary Cat: Terence Blanchard with Special Guests, an authorized biography of Blanchard written by Anthony Magro. The book features extensive interviews with Blanchard and other jazz and film greats like Branford Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, Christian McBride, Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons, and Michael Cristofer. Choice Reviews wrote: "Magro augments the conversations with background and connecting material so that the text flows nicely. History will view Blanchard as an important figure in jazz, and this book makes the case compellingly."

Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz In the fall of 2000, Terence Blanchard was named artistic director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz (formerly Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz) at the University of California Los Angeles. Herbie Hancock serves as chairman; Wayne Shorter, Clark Terry and Jimmy Heath were members of the board of trustees. The conservatory offers an intensive, tuition-free, two-year master's program to a limited number of students (maximum of eight every two years).

In his role as artistic director, Blanchard works with the students in the areas of artistic development, arranging, composition, and career counseling. He also participates in master classes and community outreach activities associated with the program. "Out of my desire to give something back to the jazz community, I wanted to get involved. In fact, I've always said that if I wasn't a musician, that I would like to be a teacher. So I was glad to get involved and to be a part of this unique program that fosters such an open and accessible environment."

Other work Blanchard and his wife, Robin Burgess, at the 91st Academy Awards, where Blanchard was nominated for Best Original Score for his soundtrack of BlacKkKlansman.

In 2007, the Monterey Jazz Festival named Blanchard Artist-In-Residence, citing him as "one his generation’s most artistically mature and innovative artists and a committed supporter of jazz education." The Monterey Jazz Festival 50th Anniversary Band featuring Blanchard on trumpet made a 54-date, 10-week tour of the United States from January 8, 2008, to March 16, 2008. Rounding out the band were saxophonist James Moody, pianist Benny Green, bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Kendrick Scott. The special ensemble also featured jazz singer Nnenna Freelon.

In December 2007, the Terence Blanchard Quintet performed the movie music of Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard with an orchestra and singers Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kurt Elling, and Raul Midón at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

In November 2008, he was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3.

On February 10, 2008, Blanchard won his first Grammy Award as a bandleader for A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina) in the category of Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. His two other Grammy Awards were as a sideman for Art Blakey (1984) and McCoy Tyner (2004).

Blanchard composed original music for Stephen Adly Guirgis's Broadway play The Motherfucker With the Hat, which premiered at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on April 11, 2011. The show is described as "a high-octane verbal cage match about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery."

On January 20, 2012, the film Red Tails was released nationwide in the United States. Blanchard served as the composer of the original score, marking the first time he has worked with executive producer George Lucas.

He composed incidental music for the 2012 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.

He released Magnetic May 28, 2013, on Blue Note Records.

Blanchard's album, Breathless, with his new band, The E-Collective, was released by Blue Note Records on May 26, 2015. Featuring Maroon 5's PJ Morton on three cuts, and JRei Oliver, Terence's son, on spoken word, the core band consists of Fabian Almazan on keyboards, Charles Altura on guitar, Donald Ramsey on bass, and Oscar Seaton on drums. Cuepoint, on the web publishing site, Medium, published Blanchard's essay, "Using Music to Underscore Three Words: I Can't Breathe" which details Blanchard's revulsion by the death of Eric Garner and how the subsequent "I Can't Breathe" campaign inspired the series of songs the E-Collective created for the album.

On November 9, 2019, Blanchard performed alongside Lady Gaga as a special guest during her Jazz and Piano show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Operas On June 15, 2013, after a workshop with Opera Fusion: New Works, Blanchard premiered his first opera, Champion, at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. It is about the life of prize fighting boxer Emile Griffith from St. Thomas, with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Cristofer. It starred Denyce Graves, Aubrey Allicock, Robert Orth, and Arthur Woodley. Champion made its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2023, receiving the best opera recording Grammy, and its Lyric Opera of Chicago premier in 2024.

On June 15, 2019, Blanchard's second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, was premiered by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. The opera, based on the 2014 memoir of the same title by Charles Blow, was expanded with added dance sequences and a larger role for the part of Billie, Charles's mother, and opened the Metropolitan Opera's 2021–2022 season. It closed the Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2021⁠–2022 mainstage opera season. Blanchard is the first Black composer to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera.

Discography As leader/co-leader A complete discography of Blanchard's jazz recordings as a bandleader. Denotes whether its available on CD

Film Year Title Director Notes 1991 Jungle Fever Spike Lee 1992 Malcolm X* 1994 Sugar Hill* Leon Ichaso 1994 Trial by Jury Heywood Gould 1994 The Inkwell Matty Rich 1994 Crooklyn Spike Lee 1995 Clockers* 1996 Get on the Bus 1997 Eve's Bayou* Kasi Lemmons 1997 'Til There Was You Scott Winant with Miles Goodman 1997 4 Little Girls Spike Lee Documentary 1998 Gia Michael Cristofer 1999 Summer of Sam Spike Lee 2000 Love & Basketball Gina Prince-Bythewood 2000 Next Friday Steve Carr 2000 Bamboozled Spike Lee 2001 The Caveman's Valentine* Kasi Lemmons 2001 Original Sin* Michael Cristofer 2001 Glitter Vondie Curtis-Hall 2002 Barbershop Tim Story 2002 Dark Blue Ron Shelton 2002 25th Hour* Spike Lee 2002 People I Know* Daniel Algrant 2004 She Hate Me* Spike Lee 2006 Inside Man* 2007 Talk to Me Kasi Lemmons 2008 Miracle at St. Anna* Spike Lee 2008 Cadillac Records Darnell Martin 2009 The Princess and the Frog John Musker and Ron Clements Trumpet playing for the Louis character 2010 Bunraku Guy Moshe 2010 Just Wright Sanaa Hamri 2012 Red Tails* Anthony Hemingway 2014 Black or White Mike Binder 2015 Chi-Raq Spike Lee 2016 The Comedian* Taylor Hackford 2018 BlacKkKlansman* Spike Lee 2019 Harriet* Kasi Lemmons 2020 Da 5 Bloods* Spike Lee 2020 One Night in Miami...* Regina King 2022 The Woman King* Gina Prince-Bythewood 2027 Children of Blood and Bone

Television Year Title Director Notes 1999 Having Our Say Lynne Littman CBS Television film 2003 Unchained Memories* Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon HBO Documentary 2006 When the Levees Broke Spike Lee HBO Documentary miniseries 2020-2023 Perry Mason HBO series; 10 episodes 2021 Genius: Aretha NatGeo series; 7 episodes 2021 NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 Spike Lee HBO Documentary series; 4 episodes 2022 Louis Armstrong's Black and Blue Sacha Jenkins Apple TV+ documentary

Awards and honors

Blanchard has received numerous accolades including five Grammy Awards. He has also received two Academy Award for Best Original Score nominations for BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). He has also received nominations for a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award.