Listen to Essential Terence Blanchard


Like Wayne Shorter – to whom his newest album, “Absence,” dedicated – Terence Blanchard is the rare jazz star whose reputation as a composer almost overshadows his reputation as a daring and stylish improviser. Almost.

opera Blanchard “The Fire In My Bones Is Out” Opening the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, he rose as a jazz phenomenon in the early 1980s and took over the trumpet seat in Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers after Wynton Marsalis’ departure. At just 20 years old, he was a double threat even then: writing compositions of helical energy and cleverly woven rhythmic interplay, and improvising violently, making sharp turns and slipping into sneaky glissando.

He soon became Spike Lee’s musical other half, a relationship that helped make film music his primary profession. And in the 21st century, he established himself as one of the most respected educators and spokespersons of jazz. Here are a few highlights from his discography.

For much of the 1980s, Blanchard led a band with alto saxophonist Donald Harrison—a New Orleans man in his 20s and the Jazz Messenger—that became one of jazz’s standard-bearing bands. Young Lions movement. In “Ninth Ward Strut,” Blanchard asserts his own identity as a composer, while the swaying second line pays homage to the distinctive sound of his hometown with rhythmic supports. The piece is rhythmically tense and harmonically rough that becomes characteristic.

Spike Lee commissioned Blanchard to record the trumpet parts of Denzel Washington’s character “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), including the title melody for the film, which has become a sort of Young Lions-era classic. Lee soon began asking Blanchard to write the score – and he didn’t stop. “Malcolm X” (1992) was one of the first films Blanchard made by exploring a wide palette of choral harmonies, strings and brass. He soon rearranged the music for the jazz sextet and recorded it for Columbia Records as “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite,” a restless and ambitious album.

Blanchard recorded this piece for the soundtrack of the 1997 film “Eve’s Bayou” by neo-soul veteran Erykah Badu and “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” libretto writer Kasi Lemmons. Joking with Badu, he pulls brash glissandos from the horn and pushes him into patter-pattering rhythmic exchanges. (It later reappeared on a deluxe edition of the “Baduizm” album.)

After recording Lee’s 2006 documentary “When the Levees Broke” about Hurricane Katrina, Blanchard adapted his compositions into a suite, as in the “Malcolm X” soundtrack. He published the results the following year as “The God’s Will Story.”

Katrina was extremely personal to Blanchard, whose mother lost her home in the storm. While Blanchard plays a pas de deux with a large string section, “Dear Mother” combines a course of admiration and energy loss. The album earned Blanchard the second of five Grammy awards for Best Major Jazz Ensemble Album.

Blanchard has for years credited working with young musicians, and in his current quintet, E-Collective, he has assembled a disruptive team of cutting-edge improvisers who regularly re-imagine how jazz-rock fusion could work. On “Anybody Can Hear Me,” from a recent live album, Blanchard’s horn is covered in an electrified robe of distortion and effects, but the precision and counter-intuition of his solo shines through.



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