Terence Blanchard Headlines Celebration of Soul 2020
Terence Blanchard was born (born March 13, 1962) in New Orleans, Louisiana, the only child of Wilhelmina and Joseph Oliver Blanchard. His father was a manager at an insurance company and a part - time opera singer.
He began playing piano at the age of five, then the trumpet at age eight after hearing Alvin Alcorn. He played trumpet with his childhood friend Wynton Marsalis in summer music camps, along with his friend Branford Marsalis. In high school, he studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts under Roger Dickerson, his composition teacher and Ellis Marsalis who wanted Blanchard to become a piano player. From 1980 to 1982, he studied under jazz saxophonist Paul Jeffrey and trumpeter Bill Fielder at Rutgers University.
In the 1990s, Blanchard recorded his self - titled debut for Columbia Records which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Jazz chart. After performing on soundtracks for Spike Lee movies, including Do the Right Thing and Mo' Better Blues, Lee wanted Blanchard to compose the scores for his films beginning with Jungle Fever (1991). Blanchard has written the score for most of Spike Lee's films since, including Malcolm X, Clockers, Summer of Sam, 25th Hour, Inside Man, and BlacKkKlansman.
He has composed more than forty film scores and performed on more than fifty and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Score on Spike Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman.
In this interview with the Grand Rapids Times, Terence talks about his early influences, why he chose to play trumpet, working with Spike Lee, and more.
GRT: How did you become interested in playing jazz?
BLANCHARD: Growing up in New Orleans, jazz was all around me. So it is not that I got interested in jazz, it was just there. It is almost like it chose me. From the time that I was a kid I was always seeing live musicians and I thought that it was something that every city had. I didn't know that it was unique to New Orleans.
GRT: Why did you choose to play the trumpet?
BLANCHARD: There was a guy named Alvin Alcorn who came to my school when I was in the fourth grade. At a school assembly he gave us a demonstration on playing New Orleans traditional music. The way that the trumpet sounded and the vocal quality of it was something that struck me, so I went home and asked my dad if I could get a trumpet.
GRT: What kinds of things do you do to be a positive influence on young people?
BLANCHARD: Well, the first thing is to be accessible. I teach at the University of California Los Angeles and I love working with students, sharing my experiences with them and getting to learn more from them. Once you give them the tools to help them develop their ideas, it is amazing what some of them come up with.
GRT: How did you get involved with Spike Lee and scoring his films?
BLANCHARD: I was just a session player for some of Spike's earlier films and he heard me playing the piano, liked what I was playing and asked me if he could use it and I said sure. So we recorded it as just a solo trumpet thing but then he asked me if I could write a string arrangement for it and I told him sure. He liked the arrangement and he told me that I had a future in the film business and then he called me to do Jungle Fever and we have been working together every since.
GRT: Where do you see your career going from this point until you maybe retire?
BLANCHARD: I have no idea, because life is always full of surprises. If you would have asked me twenty or thirty years ago if I would be writing songs for movies, I would have told you no. If you'd asked me if I thought that I would have two Oscar awards under my belt, I would have told you know. I am always trying to keep myself open to new experiences and new ideas. I am always trying to find ways to challenge myself and to find new areas of expression.
It is no fun to go into the studio and do the same thing over and over again.
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