Category: Blog

Terence Blanchard wrote his first piece of music for a Spike Lee joint nearly 30 years ago. Listen.

Spike Lee has long been known as a presence courtside at professional basketball games. But not many people realize he has a team of his own in his longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown and composer Terence Blanchard. Read More.

Tuesday morning’s (Jan. 22) Oscar nominations for best original score includes some returning favorites — Alexandre Desplat, Marc Shaiman and Nicholas Britell — as well as first-timers Terence Blanchard and Ludwig Göransson. Billboard talked to the nominees to find out how they got the good news and about working on their nominated project. Read More.

One of the most arresting sequences in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” — based on the true story of an African American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1970s Colorado — comes right at the beginning of the movie. Read More.

For three decades, Spike Lee has been one of the most reliable figures in American cinema, but one of his regular collaborators often hides in the credits: Composer Terence Blanchard has been a major part of Lee’s work since “School Daze” in 1988. Blanchard, who currently serves as the frontman for New Orleans-based jazz band The E-Collective, has been the source of emotionally resonant scores on many of Lee’s best works, from “Summer of Sam” to “25th Hour” and “Inside Man.” Read More.

Spike Lee’s go-to composer since Mo’ Better Blues hit theaters 28 years ago, Terence Blanchard knows the realities of longtime creative partnerships—the way in which the challenges that present themselves on projects change over time. It’s been a long time since Blanchard has had to have so much as an extended conversation with the director, and when BlacKkKlansman came around, the challenge became one of managing tone. Read More.

Terence Blanchard has always been drawn to a form of lyricism that runs burnished and bittersweet. You can track this mood throughout his career as a post-bop trumpeter, and no less in his dozens of film scores, in and beyond a long affiliation with Spike Lee. Read More

Just recently, a man walked up to trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard after one of his performances. He told Blanchard he was expecting to hear the lush melodies of “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina),” Blanchard’s Grammy-winning work from 2007. But instead, he was confronted with the music of “Live,” which at time rages with electric blues guitar, ominous synthesizers chords and Blanchard’s charging trumpet. Read More

The multiple Grammy winner talks about working with Spike Lee, listening to the universe — and the real-life hurricanes of this lifetime. Read More

Dressed in all black with yellow-rimmed glasses, Terence Blanchard looks every bit the jazz great he is, speaking to an intimate crowd gathered at the Loews New Orleans hotel. The multiple Grammy-winning trumpeter and composer, who graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts before touring with such legends as Lionel Hampton and Art Blakey, is perhaps best known for his many movie scores (from 1991’s “Jungle Fever” to 2016’s “The Comedian”). But it’s the National Opera Conference he’s returned to his hometown to address. Read More