Terence Blanchard - the New Orleans-born trumpeter and composer, is a creative giant who wields his talents across genres - jazz performance, orchestral music, opera, film, television, and the Broadway stage – in creating original, impeccable work while giving voice to issues of black history, human rights, and racial injustice. Of Blanchard, the New York Times rightly says, “Blanchard’s body of work is one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician.”
Blanchard has released over 20 solo albums, garnered 15 Grammy nominations while winning eight, written over 80 scores for movies and television (earning two Oscar nominations and an Emmy nod), had two operas premier at the Met, and performed with every jazz notable as a guest artist and as part of his own band. In 2024 he was both named an NEA Jazz Master and inducted into the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Letters, and currently serves as the Executive Artistic Director for SF Jazz, the largest non-profit jazz presenter in the world.
Blanchard was born in 1962 and began the piano at age five and the trumpet when he was eight. In high school he attended the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, studying under Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis and alongside classmates Wynton and Branford Marsalis. He went pro in 1980, playing in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while studying jazz at Rutgers University; two years later, he left Rutgers to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Blanchard toured and recorded for five years with the Messengers, along with regular partner in crime and fellow New Orleanian Donald Harrison Jr.
In 1986, Blanchard and Harrison broke away to form their own quintet, a group of “young lions” that also included Cyrus Chestnut, Rodney Whitaker, and Carl Allen. Blanchard had to pause his career a few years later with embouchure issues, but roared back with a vengeance with a solo career that began with a self-titled debut album that hit No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart and the launching of his prolific career in film performance and scoring.
Blanchard first came to the movies when he played on a pair of Spike Lee film soundtracks, including the 1989 hit Do the Right Thing and, a year later, Mo' Better Blues. Lee then hired Blanchard to write the music for the 1991 Jungle Fever, and since then he has composed the original score for most of Lee's films over the past four decades, including Malcolm X, 25th Hour, Inside Man, the four-part HBO Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, BlacKkKlansman, and Da 5 Bloods. Blanchard’s prolific scoring credits also include Regina King’s One Night in Miami; Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou; George Lucas’ Red Tails; the HBO series Perry Mason; Apple TV’s docuseries They Call Me Magic (for which he earned an Emmy nod) and Gina Prince Bythewood and Viola Davis’ critically acclaimed film, The Woman King. Entertainment Weekly proclaimed Blanchard’s work "central to a general resurgence of jazz composition for film."
Not content with just scoring, Blanchard performed all of the trumpet parts for the alligator character Louis in Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog, and voiced the role of Earl the bandleader in the riverboat band. Years later, Blanchard produced the music for the Disney theme park attraction Tiana's Bayou Adventure, which is inspired by The Princess and the Frog.
As with so many New Orleans musicians, Hurricane Katrina generated a deeply personal and powerful response from Blanchard. In the HBO series, he and his mother were documented searching for her home, destroyed when the levees failed. A year later, Blanchard released A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina), which included reworkings of the film score as well as new works, and which won a 2008 Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, Blanchard’s first Grammy as a bandleader.
Blanchard soon turned his compositional and storytelling skills to the opera stage, first with Champion, exploring the troubled life of boxer Emile Griffith, staged in 2013 in St. Louis, and later premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2023. Blanchard’s next work, the 2021 Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on writer Charles Blow’s memoir, struck a deep chord as a testament to the Black coming-of-age experience, resilience and the human spirit. The Met premiered the work to open its 2021-22 season, making it the first opera by a Black composer to premier at the Met in its 138-year history, and re-staged the work in 2024. Both operas earned Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording.
As a performer, Blanchard continues to gig and record regularly with several different ensembles, including his E-Collective, and as a guest artist, while his music honors forbears like Wayne Shorter and confronts contemporary themes of racism and social injustice. He is also dedicated to music education; from 2000 to 2011 he was artistic director of the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz, and has held similar positions at the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami, and as an endowed chair in Jazz Studies at UCLA. 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.
