Terence Blanchard is an African American trumpeter and composer born in New Orleans in 1962. He began learning piano and trumpet as a child and studied with Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. From 1980 to 1982 he studied at Rutgers University in New Jersey while touring with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, and his professional career began in Hampton's band before he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1982. He later formed a quintet with fellow musician Donald Harrison, a 2022 NEA Jazz Master, and now leads the E Collective.
His work with filmmaker Spike Lee began with trumpet: Blanchard played solos on the scores for Do the Right Thing and Mo' Better Blues in the late 1980s, and Lee then asked him to compose, starting with Jungle Fever in 1991. The partnership produced the scores for Malcolm X and many more films across three decades, a collaboration that has spanned some seventeen films.
Composition also took him into opera. Fire Shut Up in My Bones draws on Charles Blow's memoir, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis premiered the work in 2019, and in 2021 it opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera by a Black composer performed at that institution in its 138-year history. The opera later aired on PBS's Great Performances.
Blanchard has held educational positions at Berklee College of Music, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and UCLA, where he occupies the Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies. A six-time Grammy winner, he was named a 2024 NEA Jazz Master. His career brings performance, composition and teaching together through collaborations with musicians, filmmakers, writers and opera companies.
