Terence Blanchard: From New Orleans Trumpet to the Metropolitan Opera

Terence Blanchard (born March 13, 1962, in New Orleans) is the trumpeter who replaced Wynton Marsalis in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1982, recorded for Columbia Records, and in 2021 became the first Black composer to have an opera staged by the Metropolitan Opera, with Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Alongside his own bands he has scored most of Spike Lee’s films since Jungle Fever (1991), earning Oscar nominations for BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2024 and leads SFJAZZ in San Francisco as its executive artistic director.

New Orleans Beginnings

Blanchard was the only child of Wilhelmina and Joseph Oliver Blanchard. His father was a manager at an insurance company and an amateur opera singer. Terence started on piano at five and switched to trumpet at eight, after hearing the New Orleans trumpeter Alvin Alcorn play at his school. He went to summer music camps with his childhood friends Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and transferred to John F. Kennedy High School so he could attend the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), where he studied with Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis.

From 1980 to 1982 he studied at Rutgers University with saxophonist Paul Jeffrey and trumpeter Bill Fielder, and toured with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while still a student.

The Jazz Messengers and the Columbia Years

In 1982, just before his 20th birthday, Blanchard left Rutgers to take the trumpet chair in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, on Wynton Marsalis’s recommendation. Blakey made him the band’s musical director. With fellow New Orleans native Donald Harrison on saxophone, he toured widely and recorded five albums with the Messengers, among them Oh-By the Way (Timeless, 1982), New York Scene (Concord, 1984) and Blue Night (Timeless, 1985). The band had long served as hard bop's finishing school, and Blanchard’s tenure put him in that line.

Blanchard and Harrison left in 1986 to co-lead a quintet with pianist Cyrus Chestnut, bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Carl Allen, recording Nascence, Crystal Stair and Black Pearl for Columbia between 1986 and 1988. In 1989 Blanchard stopped performing to rebuild his embouchure. He returned with a self-titled solo album on Columbia in 1991, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart, and followed it with Simply Stated (1992), The Malcolm X Jazz Suite (1993), In My Solitude: The Billie Holiday Songbook (1994), Romantic Defiance (1995) and The Heart Speaks (1996), a collaboration with Ivan Lins that was nominated for a Grammy in the Latin jazz category.

Three albums for Sony Classical followed, including Wandering Moon (2000) and Let’s Get Lost (2001), a set of Jimmy McHugh songs with Diana Krall, Jane Monheit, Dianne Reeves and Cassandra Wilson as guest singers. In 2003 he moved to Blue Note with Bounce, and Herbie Hancock produced its follow-up, Flow (2005).

Film Scores: Spike Lee and Beyond

Blanchard first worked for Spike Lee as a player, on the soundtracks of Do the Right Thing (1989) and Mo’ Better Blues (1990). Lee then hired him to compose the score for Jungle Fever (1991), and Blanchard has written the music for most of Lee’s films since. The main ones:

• Malcolm X (1992)
• Clockers (1995) and the documentary 4 Little Girls (1997)
• Summer of Sam (1999) and Bamboozled (2000)
• 25th Hour (2002), nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Original Score
• Inside Man (2006) and Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
• BlacKkKlansman (2018), nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the BAFTA for Best Original Music
• Da 5 Bloods (2020), his second Oscar nomination for Best Original Score

“Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil)” from the BlacKkKlansman score won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition in 2019. For Lee’s four-hour HBO documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), Blanchard wrote the score and also appeared on camera with his mother as they searched for her house in Pontchartrain Park, destroyed after Hurricane Katrina.

He has worked just as steadily for other directors. For Kasi Lemmons he scored Eve’s Bayou (1997), The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) and Harriet (2019); for Gina Prince-Bythewood, Love & Basketball (2000) and The Woman King (2022); for Regina King, One Night in Miami… (2020). He also scored Red Tails (2012), his first project with executive producer George Lucas. In all he has written more than 80 film and television scores.

Two Disney projects tie back to his hometown. In The Princess and the Frog (2009) he played all the trumpet parts for Louis, the trumpet-playing alligator, and voiced the riverboat bandleader Earl. Fifteen years later Disney asked him to produce the music for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the theme park attraction based on the film.

Champion and Fire Shut Up in My Bones

Blanchard calls his stage works “opera in jazz” rather than jazz opera. The first, Champion, has a libretto by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cristofer and tells the story of Emile Griffith, the welterweight boxer from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Co-commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Jazz St. Louis, it premiered in St. Louis on June 15, 2013, and was later staged in San Francisco (2016, with SFJAZZ) and by Washington National Opera (2017).

The second, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, is based on the 2014 memoir of the same name by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, the director of Eve’s Bayou. It follows Charles as he grows up poor in Louisiana and comes to terms with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. The title quotes Jeremiah 20:9. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis gave the premiere on June 15, 2019.

On September 27, 2021, Fire Shut Up in My Bones opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-22 season, the first opera by a Black composer the company had performed since its founding in 1883. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted, Camille A. Brown co-directed and choreographed, and the cast included Will Liverman, Angel Blue and Latonia Moore. It had not been planned as the season opener; general manager Peter Gelb said the Black Lives Matter movement informed his decision to give it that slot. The production was filmed for the Met’s Live in HD series, and its recording won the Grammy for Best Opera Recording in 2023. The opera returned to the Met in 2024 with Ryan Speedo Green as Charles.

The Met staged Champion in April 2023, with Ryan Speedo Green, Eric Owens and Latonia Moore among the soloists. That recording won the Grammy for Best Opera Recording in 2024. Blanchard has also written for the theater on Broadway, including incidental music for the 2012 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Five Albums to Start With

Blanchard’s trumpet is the main voice on all of these, but each shows a different side of his work. For the wider history of the instrument, see our guide to the great jazz trumpet players.

1. A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina) (Blue Note, 2007). Built from his score for When the Levees Broke, with new pieces added, for his quintet with strings. It won the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2008, his first as a bandleader, and “Levees” was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo. Start here.

2. In My Solitude: The Billie Holiday Songbook (Columbia, 1994). Holiday’s repertoire with singer Jeanie Bryson, a string section and a rhythm section of Bruce Barth, Chris Thomas and Troy Davis. It is the clearest place to hear his ballad playing.

3. Flow (Blue Note, 2005). Produced by Herbie Hancock, who plays piano on “Benny’s Tune.” A band record that moves between modal pieces, straight swing, southern soul grooves and West African rhythms, and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.

4. Breathless (Blue Note, 2015). The debut of the E-Collective, his electric band with Fabian Almazan on keyboards, Charles Altura on guitar, Donald Ramsey on bass and Oscar Seaton on drums. The title refers to Eric Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” and the album deals with racism and its aftermath. PJ Morton sings on three tracks and Blanchard’s son JRei Oliver contributes spoken word. Grammy-nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.

5. Absence (Blue Note, 2021). A tribute to his mentor Wayne Shorter, recorded with the E-Collective and the Turtle Island Quartet, mixing Shorter compositions with Blanchard originals. It received two Grammy nominations, for Best Jazz Instrumental Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo.

The Met recordings of Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Champion are the natural next step after these. For more records in the same vein, our list of the best jazz albums of all time goes back to the music Blanchard grew up on.

Teaching, Awards and SFJAZZ

Teaching has run alongside his performing career. From 2000 to 2011 Blanchard was artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz), and he lobbied for the program’s 2007 move from Los Angeles to Loyola University New Orleans after Katrina. He then led the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami, became a visiting scholar in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music in 2015, and held an endowed chair in jazz studies at UCLA from 2019 to 2023.

Grammy.com lists seven Grammy wins for him, a count the National Endowment for the Arts also uses. Besides the album and opera awards above, they include Best Jazz Instrumental Solo for “Be-Bop” (2009) and Best Improvised Jazz Solo for “Dancin’ 4 Chicken” (2010). The NEA named him a 2024 NEA Jazz Master.

Blanchard is now executive artistic director of SFJAZZ, the San Francisco organization Randall Kline founded as a festival in 1983. He still performs: on February 15, 2026, he and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane played a centennial tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, marking 100 years since the births of Miles Davis and Coltrane in 1926. Tour dates and news are on his official website.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Terence Blanchard known for?

Terence Blanchard is a New Orleans jazz trumpeter and composer. He played in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers from 1982 to 1986, has scored most of Spike Lee’s films since 1991 (with Oscar nominations for BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods), and in 2021 became the first Black composer to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera, with Fire Shut Up in My Bones. He is a 2024 NEA Jazz Master and executive artistic director of SFJAZZ.

Who did Terence Blanchard replace in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers?

He replaced Wynton Marsalis, who recommended him for the trumpet chair in 1982. Blakey made Blanchard the band’s musical director. He left in 1986 to co-lead a quintet with saxophonist Donald Harrison that recorded for Columbia, and released his first solo album on Columbia in 1991.

Is Fire Shut Up in My Bones based on a true story?

Yes. The opera is based on the 2014 memoir of the same name by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, about growing up in Louisiana and dealing with the abuse he suffered as a child. Kasi Lemmons wrote the libretto. It premiered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2019 and opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season on September 27, 2021.

Which Spike Lee films did Terence Blanchard score?

Starting with Jungle Fever in 1991, Blanchard has scored most of Spike Lee’s films, including Malcolm X, Clockers, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, 25th Hour, Inside Man, Miracle at St. Anna, BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods, as well as the Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke.