artist info

Terence Blanchard, who early on made a name for himself as a top tier jazz trumpeter from New Orleans, has gone on to enjoy a multifaceted career both in the jazz camp and beyond. He’s not only a five-time Grammy Award winner, but he’s also a renowned film-score and soundtrack composer (most recently for George Lucas’s 2012 “Red Tails,” a film about the Tuskegee Airmen).

Add to those achievements Blanchard’s recent success composing for Broadway, including the score for the world premiere of playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker With a Hat starring Chris Rock, who garnered six Tony nominations, and the Emily Mann-directed revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play A Streetcar Named Desire. He was also commissioned by Opera St. Louis to compose an opera with Tony Award winning librettist Michael Cristofer. He has served as the artistic director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s jazz series, and, after serving as the artistic director of the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz for a decade since 2000, was named artistic director of the Henri Mancini Institute, the program at the University of Miami Frost School of Music, in 2011. “Becoming the artistic director of the Mancini Institute is really exciting for me. They are committed to cutting-edge education in the program, which is run by Shelly Berg. It’s a program with a vision. I’ve been in my first year, and he’s constantly talking about reshaping the program, re-evaluating what we’ve done and how to find out what students really need.” Blanchard attends the institute for one week every month and works with music students on improvisation, composition and performance. In addition, Blanchard serves as the artist in residence at the Detroit Jazz Festival over the Labor Day long weekend in 2012. Blanchard concedes that he’s very busy these days, but adds, “I’m blessed.”

Blanchard is renowned in jazz circles as a remarkable trumpeter, composer, arranger and bandleader. Vanity Fair writes, “He plays the most coolly expressive trumpet in jazz, transmuting the instrument’s repertoire of smears, growls, peeps and blasts into an astonishingly fluid language both luxurious and controlled.”A veteran of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (recommended by Wynton Marsalis as his replacement in 1983), Blanchard began his own recording career in a band co-led with saxophonist Donald Harrison. Since then, Blanchard has been very prolific: Choices (2009) was Blanchard’s 18th album as a leader/co-leader and his 39th album overall.