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Terence Blanchard
Terence Blanchard is keeping busy with a well-received new CD, scoring movies and as the artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at the University of Southern California.
By PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 19, 2000
[Photo: Joseph Pluchino]
Trumpeter Terence Blanchard has worked on a string of Spike Lee movies as well as Love and Basketball, Eve’s Bayou, The Inkwell and several television movies.
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Wandering Moon, Terence Blanchard's recent collection of simply stated, warmly crafted ballads, has generated some of the best reviews yet for the New Orleans trumpeter, also known for his work composing, arranging and conducting the scores for films by Spike Lee and others.
The disc, a set of nine original compositions and a standard, I Thought About You, features special guests Branford Marsalis on tenor saxophone and Dave Holland on bass. It follows last year's acclaimed Jazz in Film, a band-plus-orchestra tribute to Blanchard's favorite film noir themes, including Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire and Jerry Goldsmith's Chinatown.
The New York Times, reviewing the new CD, called the instrumentalist a "master of tone," while Entertainment Weekly praised his "ever-individualized vision" and People wrote of a "quietly dazzling album."
So why the long wait between 1995's Romantic Defiance and his latest album of small-group jazz?
"It was something that I already had planned," Blanchard said from his studio in New Orleans, where he was working on the score for Original Sin, a forthcoming Michael Cristofer film starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas. "It had been in the works for a while. Other records were just a means for me to explore and investigate other people's music, take a break from writing and actually learn as much as I could about composition from the eyes of other people."
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Blanchard, 38, the closing-night headliner at the Clearwater Jazz Holiday, is a quick study who has made great strides since his eponymous solo debut, released in 1991. He began studying piano at age 5, got serious about trumpet at 16 and played with Lionel Hampton from 1980 to 1982, off and on while attending Rutgers University. He then replaced old pal Wynton Marsalis as trumpeter and musical director for Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and co-led a quintet with saxophonist Donald Harrison during the second half of the '80s. The two released seven albums together, and their split coincided with the production of Lee's 1991 Mo' Better Blues.
The trumpeter was a featured player in Branford Marsalis' group on that soundtrack, and he taught Denzel Washington how to masquerade as a trumpet player. The door was suddenly opened to a second career.
Lee "asked me to score one of the scenes for Mo' Better Blues," Blanchard said. "I was playing a song, and he came in and said, "What is that?' I said, "It's something I'm writing for my next record,' and he wanted to use it for a scene. I had always been interested in composing. I saw this whole concept of having 50 or 60 musicians playing music for film. It was really a dream because then I got a chance to create all of these colors and textures."
Blanchard's dream came true not long after, and he has since worked on a string of Lee films, including Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Clockers, Get on the Bus, Four Little Girls, Summer of Sam and the just-released Bamboozled.
He's also scored the soundtracks for films directed by Gina Prince (Love and Basketball), Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou and the forthcoming Caveman's Valentine), Scott Winant (Til There Was You), and Matty Rich (The Inkwell) as well as several television movies. But he has a special working relationship with Lee, the son of jazz musician Bill Lee.
"It's always great working with him because he's a visionary," Blanchard said. "He's always going to do something different. It always challenges me in terms of what I'm going to write for a movie. He also gives me a lot of freedom. He trusts me."
Bamboozled, a controversial movie concerning African-American images in film and on television, offered Blanchard a pair of challenges: What kind of music would he compose to match the complicated emotional terrain, and how would he deal with the visuals of the relatively low-budget effort, shot largely on video?
"I have some kind of emotional connection to film that I've developed over the years," Blanchard said. "Writing for something shot on video was kind of a challenge. The other part was having to really figure out what we were going to score."
Blanchard, who returned to New Orleans several years ago after making his breakthrough in New York and spending time in Los Angeles, has taken on yet another challenge: He recently signed on as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at the University of Southern California. The trumpeter will spend about four days a month on campus at USC. He views the post, in part, as a way of helping extend the jazz legacy. "There's still a vast array of possibilities, in terms of trying to nudge young talent, in recognizing a person's unique abilities and not squashing that part, that side of their musical personality, but really trying to help them develop that," he said.
"I'm excited. I think it (mentoring) is very necessary. Clark Terry, Sweets Edison, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Shaw and Freddie Hubbard were all very nice to me. They all helped me whenever they could. They always gave me great information and they were always accessible to me. If those guys could be that way, who am I to do anything different?"
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