This Juneteenth, join EJI at 7:30 pm for a concert with legendary trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard. Mr Blanchard’s body of work has been esteemed by The New York Times as “one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician.”
Get ticketsBorn in 1962 to a father who sang opera selections and a mother who taught music, Terence Blanchard became exposed to the arts from a young age. He began piano lessons at the age of five and discovered the trumpet at age eight, finding his calling while he was still a young boy. At summer camp, he befriended Wynton and Branford Marsalis, who would become legendary musicians. As a teenager, he studied with renowned jazz artists and educators Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
After graduating and moving to New York in 1981, Mr. Blanchard studied music at Rutgers University and toured with Lionel Hampton. Mr. Blanchard soon joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, replacing fellow trumpeter Wynton Marsalis at the suggestion of Mr. Marsalis himself. Mr. Blanchard played in this band for several years before breaking out on his own and releasing his first solo album in 1992.
From the beginning of his solo career, Mr. Blanchard garnered much attention, performing soon after his first solo album in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues. He went on to score many of Mr. Lee’s subsequent films, including When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina.
The film was more than just a project to Mr. Blanchard—the Blanchard family home in Pontchartrain Park, New Orleans’s first Black suburban development, was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In the documentary, a reviewer wrote, Mr. Blanchard “uses every principle he has mastered as a genius jazz trumpeter to relay the impact of the destruction, the frustration, the sadness, and the hope for a future.”
Mr. Blanchard’s legendary career has spanned genres, venues, and seven Grammy awards and 16 nominations. He has written more than 80 film and television scores, including 20 Spike Lee movies. He was nominated for an Academy Award for two of those films, Da 5 Bloods and BlacKkKlansman, making him one of only two Black composers to receive two Oscar nominations for Best Original Score.
Mr. Blanchard is also the first artist to win Grammy Awards as an opera composer, jazz composer, and jazz soloist. He is a 2024 Jazz Master honoree, the highest honor the U.S. bestows on jazz artists. The Lincoln Center has said that Mr. Blanchard “stands tall as one of jazz’s most-esteemed trumpeters and defies expectations by creating a spectrum of artistic pursuits.”
In addition to his work on films and television, Mr. Blanchard has composed music for Broadway shows, dance collaborations, operas, and orchestras. Mr. Blanchard’s opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, was produced by the Metropolitan Opera to open its 2021-22 season in New York. It was the first opera by a Black composer to premiere at the Met in its entire history.
While Mr. Blanchard’s career has soared to great heights, central to everything he does are his beautiful and inspiring jazz recordings. As he said in an interview, “Writing for film is fun, but nothing can beat being a jazz musician, playing a club, playing a concert.”
EJI is thrilled that Mr. Blanchard will bring his talents to Montgomery for an unforgettable performance on Juneteenth. Tickets are available here.