HITS GALORE

Terence Blanchard had a pair of audacious dreams while growing up in New Orleans. He’d be a hard-hitting linebacker in the National Football League and a serial hitmaker in the field of jazz. He’d recover fumbles and run in for scores in the fall and winter months and compose scores for movies in the offseason.

But Blanchard—an All-City football player in the 1970s—had to shed one of his dreams as a teenager. His late father, Oliver, an avid opera and classical music fan, had viewed a documentary about concussed football players and then essentially told his trumpeter/pianist/ gridder, “Turn in your helmet and pads, son, for good.”

“I was crushed,” the 61-year-old Blanchard recalls.

Football’s loss turned out to be music’s 100- yard gain. Blanchard became a professional jazz musician/composer/bandleader, a seventime Grammy Award winner, and a two-time Academy Award nominee. He has provided scores for 20 of Spike Lee’s 35-plus projects— including the movies Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, Inside Man, BlacKkKlansman, and Da 5 Bloods—worked with co-director George Lucas on the movie Red Tails and performed with Lady Gaga as a special guest at a Las Vegas show in 2019.

Go ahead, Mr. Blanchard. You have every right to spike your trumpet triumphantly.

“It’s been an amazing ride, a rewarding and challenging journey,” Blanchard, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, says of his 35-year relationship with Lee that began when he served as a session musician for the 1988 movie School Daze.

“Spike has helped me grow artistically. “Spike Lee and George Lucas,” he adds, “work similarly; they both give others plenty of room to create, because they’re always confident in the moviemaking people around them.”

Blanchard, who splits his time at residences in Los Angeles and New Orleans, joins Chicago Philharmonic for a specially curated symphonic concert of his film score highlights on January 13, 7:30-9:30 p.m., at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. Featured selections include his work for Inside Man (2006), starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, and Jodie Foster. The crime/thriller is about an exacting detective (Washington), an incisive bank robber (Owen), and a power broker (Foster).

Images of films will be projected throughout the Terence Blanchard: Film Scores LIVE! performance.

“It’ll be a fun, interesting night,” Blanchard says. “I usually laugh at a certain point in a show like that. I close my eyes when I perform, and when I open them, I look out at the audience members and they’re all looking up at the movie scenes unfolding behind me. That’s funny to me.”

Blanchard banks on a flood of memories— good and awful ones—to stir him each time he revisits the sounds of Inside Man. He’d birthed them for the flick in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina attempted to swallow his beloved New Orleans whole and reduce “The Big Easy” to “The Town Littler Than a Hamlet.”

“Devastating,” Blanchard says of the force that killed nearly 2,000 people and caused damage estimated between $100 billion and $150 billion. “After it hit, I wouldn’t hear from my mother (Wilhelmina) until two weeks later. The hurricane destroyed lives, families, homes. But it failed to keep the survivors in New Orleans down. So many of us stayed resilient and told Katrina, ‘You’re not going to get me!’ A lot of good came out of that horrible time.

“I found my voice as a musician.”

Blanchard, with 75 credits to his name, has recorded 20 albums and composed two operas: Champion (2013) and Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019). The former is about the troubled life of boxer Emile Griffith and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in April. The latter is based on the memoir of celebrated writer and New York Times columnist Charles Blow. It opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-2022 season in New York. The recording of those performances received the Grammy Award for “Best Opera Recording.”

Among his other Grammy Award-winning works: Be-Bop, for “Best Improvised Jazz Solo,” and A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), for “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.”

Blanchard earned his Academy Award nominations for “Best Original Score” in 2018 (BlacKkKlansman) and in 2020 (Da 5 Bloods).

“My phone is starting to ring again,” Blanchard says, referring to the deafening silence he heard during the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes. “I’m thinking, now that they’re both resolved, things will start to really pick up in February and March.”

Named a USA Fellow trumpeter/composer in 2018, Blanchard served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now named the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) at UCLA from 2000-2011. He also held leadership and teaching posts at the Henry Mancini Institute (University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Florida) and at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

“You always hope your music, as well as how you teach it, has a positive impact on young musicians,” says Blanchard, who raised four grown children, and whose wife of 27 years, Robin, doubles as his manager. “There’s not an educator out there who doesn’t enjoy seeing a student’s light bulb go on during a class or a session.”

Blanchard first toured with Hancock—a 14-time Grammy Award winner and 2013 Kennedy Center honoree—about 11 years ago. Hancock, the musician, is 83 going on 38, if you ask Blanchard.

“Herbie continues to kick my (backside), musically,” a chuckling Blanchard says. “It’s truly been a blessing knowing him, learning from him, and working with him. He still inspires me.”

The late Wayne Shorter heartened Blanchard. A jazz saxophonist/composer/ bandleader/extraordinary improviser, Shorter, like many of Blanchard’s mentors and friends, had to consider upsizing after hauling a 12th Grammy home.

Shorter died in March at age 89.

But his music lives on.

“Wayne,” Blanchard says, “influenced me greatly as a musician. I gravitated toward composition because of him, because of his boldness. He was comfortable taking chances in music. Jazz spoke to him. Jazz told him, ‘I dare you.’”

Auditorium Theatre is located at 50 East Ida B. Wells Drive, in Chicago. Visit chicagophilharmonic.org for ticket information and more about Terence Blanchard: Film Scores LIVE! The symphonic concert will also feature conductor Scott Speck and the E-Collective Quintet, for which Blanchard plays the trumpet.