Jazz Icon Terence Blanchard Brings His Reimagined Fan-Favorite Album to Soka
- Eric Marchese
- Apr 9
- 8 min read
The multitalented musician and Spike Lee collaborator will revisit his album “Flow” – reworked to perform with the E-collective string quartet – during his upcoming jazz concert in Aliso Viejo.
Since the early 20th century, a steady stream of great American trumpet players has emerged – a list that includes Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Doc Severinsen and Wynton Marsalis.
Add Terence Blanchard to that roster. Over the past 40 years, Blanchard, who told Culture OC that at an early age, he was “enthralled” after first hearing the trumpet, has staked out territory not just as a trumpet virtuoso, but also as a recording artist, composer – including scores for numerous films – educator and mentor.
You might not immediately recognize his name, but his music has been heard in films by Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons and other major directors. He’s an NEA Jazz Master, two-time Emmy and Oscar nominee and eight-time Grammy-winner, and he’s been a hugely influential force in the jazz world since the early ’80s.
A recent New York Times assessment of Blanchard’s body of work defined him as “one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician.”
Now, Blanchard is about to visit Orange County, with an April 12 concert at Soka Performing Arts Center that’s part of an extensive, multi-city tour. The music features his reimagining of his signature 2005 album “Flow,” and Blanchard is sharing the stage with the E-Collective, a quartet that has worked closely with Blanchard and knows and understands his music.
Culture OC caught up with Blanchard to learn more about him and give local arts patrons a chance to hear and read about him as a musician and, in general, a creative force.
Blanchard told us he’s no stranger to Orange County stages, although it’s “years ago” since he played in black box venues such as Segerstrom Center’s Samueli Hall circa 2000.
Blanchard’s early life and education
Terence Oliver Blanchard was born in New Orleans on March 13, 1962, the only child of Wilhelmina and Joseph Oliver Blanchard. His father was an insurance company manager and an amateur opera singer.
Blanchard began playing piano at the age of 5. Then, something happened that literally changed his life.
Trumpet player Alvin Alcorn “came to my elementary school and gave a demonstration of his music. I was enthralled.”
Blanchard said he told his dad, “I want to play trumpet – but dad said ‘we just got you a piano and you need to be practicing that.’”
Blanchard said he persisted voicing his desire to switch to trumpet, and that the same year, he had a horn and began playing it.
His earliest trumpet-playing influences include “a lot of guys in New Orleans who I was hearing, like Wallace Davenport and Emery Thompson. Then I quickly found out about Miles Davis.”
In summer music camps, Blanchard played trumpet alongside his childhood friends and elementary school classmates, brothers Wynton and Branford Marsalis.
We asked Blanchard to detail his trumpet-playing style early in his career. “Man, I don’t know. I feel like I’m still trying to develop that.”
His schooling included attending St. Augustine High until transferring to John F. Kennedy High School so he could attend the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where he studied under Ellis Marsalis and Roger Dickerson.
In his chat with Culture OC, Blanchard cited the influence of Marsalis and Dickerson, saying of his work as an educator and mentor that he has “always loved being in education because of how I had great teachers in Ellis and Roger. They taught me about my relationship to the world through music, and I’ve tried to pass along my experiences to my students.”
Breaking into the business
After his earlier studies, Blanchard enrolled in and attended Rutgers University, where he studied under trumpeter Bill Fielder and jazz saxophonist Paul Jeffrey. He broke into show business in 1980 at the relatively early age of 18, when he began playing with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra.
In 1982, just before he turned 20, he dropped out of Rutgers to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, thereby launching a professional career now in its fifth decade. Shortly thereafter, legendary jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis recommended that the band replace him with Blanchard.
Taking over as the Jazz Messengers’ musical director, Blanchard recorded five albums with the band. Then, in 1986, he formed his own quintet, which launched several important careers and influenced a new generation of influential jazz artists.
Recordings, film scores and more
Blanchard has logged a total of 23 albums to date, starting with 1984’s “New York Second Line” with pal Donald Harrison. Most of Blanchard’s albums have been issued by Columbia, Sony Classical, Concord and Blue Note, and most are primarily jazz, including “Black Pearl” (1988, one of five albums with Harrison), “Terence Blanchard” (1991), “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite” (1993), “In My Solitude: The Billie Holiday Songbook” (1994),“Jazz in Film” (1999), and, of course, “Flow” (2005).
Blanchard’s most recent recordings are jazz fusion albums in collaboration with the E-Collective: “Breathless” (2005), “Live” (2018) and “Absence” (2021).
Which of these does he consider the most significant? “It’s hard to say. They all have different meanings. ‘Malcolm X’ was a good one for me at the time. ‘Romantic Defiance’ (1995) and ‘The Heart Speaks’ (1996) are others. ‘Flow’ was hugely successful, and I got a chance to learn a lot from it,” and “Absence” (2021), his most recent, “documents my relationship with Wayne Shorter.”
The pinnacle of these remains “Flow.” Released by Blue Note in June 2005, it was nominated for a Best Jazz Instrumental Album Grammy Award. The Washington Post’s Mike Joyce wrote that its 11 tracks “embrace modal harmonic forms as well as flat-out swing, Southern soul grooves and West African beats, acoustic textures and synth-triggered shadings.”
Vincent Thomas of AllMusic wrote that the album "exhibits that no one better balances traditionalism, provincialism and contemporary aesthetics (than) Blanchard.”
Blanchard’s objective with the album, a pinnacle of his career, was to create music that answers a simple but immense question: What brings joy and purpose to people’s lives?
This basic query and the album’s title were inspired by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” which explores issues such as creativity, peak performance and genuine happiness.
Inspired in part by Miles Davis’ landmark groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Flow” employs unusual sonorities, deep funk grooves and a collage of global influences. Produced by Herbie Hancock, it proved to be one of Blanchard’s landmark critical and creative achievements.
Blanchard told Culture OC the album represented “the first time we felt validated, because of Herbie. He made us realize we had developed our own sound, and that gave us the confidence to move forward and try other things.”
Blanchard said he first met Spike Lee while working as a session player for some of the director’s early films. “He heard me playing (piano), and that’s literally how it all started.”
He wrote his first score for Lee for 1991’s “Jungle Fever.” Since then, Blanchard has scored 14 more of Lee’s films, including “Malcolm X,” “Crooklyn,” “Clockers,” “Summer of Sam,” “25th Hour” and “Inside Man.”
His scores for Lee’s 2018 film “BlacKKKlansman” and 2020’s “Da 5 Bloods” earned Academy Award nominations.
Blanchard is indeed prolific, having written more than 80 film and television scores, including “Talk to Me” and three others for Kasi Lemmons, “The Comedian” with Taylor Hackford, “Gia” and “Original Sin” for director Michael Cristofer, “Dark Blue” for Ron Shelton, and “Glitter” with Vondie Curtis-Hall.
Composing opera has been yet another Blanchard signature. So, how does a New Orleans-bred jazz musician wind up creating and composing operas?
Blanchard said, “Jim Robinson, who used to work for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, called me up and asked me to write an opera.”
“I’m never one to shy away from a challenge,” he said. While as a child, “I heard my dad, a baritone opera singer, so opera wasn’t foreign to me. At the same time, it was a huge challenge.”
The opera “Champion,” about the life of prize-fighting boxer Emile Griffith from St Thomas, was workshopped with Opera Fusion: New Works” in June of 2013, and got its premiere that year with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Michael Cristofer provided the libretto.
He made history when his opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” became the first opera by a Black composer performed by New York City’s Metropolitan Opera when it opened the company's 2021-22 season. The Met then premiered the Blanchard opera “Champion” in 2023, snagging the Grammy for best opera recording. Blanchard also became the first composer since Richard Strauss to receive two operatic premieres in successive seasons. In 2024, “Champion” got its premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
What Soka patrons will experience
Blanchard will celebrate with an exploration of his critically acclaimed 2005 album “Flow” with the E-Collective, a quartet of musicians that knows his music intimately. To celebrate this fan-favorite album and his own growth as an artist over the last 20 years, Blanchard has reworked the music of “Flow” specifically for the quartet.
The original recording of Blanchard’s 2005 album “Flow” did not include a string quartet. Blanchard said therefore, after a conscious effort to create “the best concert experience possible for patrons,” he decided that the final configuration for the current tour would replace the Turtle Island Quartet with the E-Collective, whose members Charles Altura, guitar, Fabian Almazan, piano and synthesizers, Oscar Seaton, drums, and David “DJ” Ginyard, bass, are familiar with much of Blanchard’s previous work.
At 7 p.m., Blanchard will give a pre-concert lecture and discussion exploring his musical journey, from jazz to opera and film – including his work with Lee – and his role as an educator and mentor.
The lecture, Blanchard told us, covers “things I’ve done, composition and techniques for performance. I try to make it more like a Q & A, because when I just talk, I feel I miss what people came to learn about and experience.”
Blanchard called the collection of shows he’s been doing less of a formal tour and a lot more of a mini-tour running from this month to the end of May and including cities like Aliso Viejo, Santa Clara and New Orleans.
Blanchard told us that over the last three or four years, he’s been touring with both Turtle Island and E-Collective, saying that “the only string music in the current tour” features Turtle Island with Blanchard playing excerpts from one of his operas.
In celebration of Blanchard’s artistic achievements, he and the E-Collective have reimagined the music from “Flow” for this year’s 20th anniversary tour, of which the Soka Center is just one stop.
Blanchard said that “about three-fourths” of the concert’s music is from “Flow” and that he and the E-Collective “are playing some of the music from the album and also writing new material for the same concert.”
So, what style will audiences hear? “We don’t know what to call it. I don’t like to get into the whole label thing, so just call it jazz. I just like fusing different things together.”
What would Blanchard’s life have been like without music? “Dull. Uneventful. Boring.”
Terence Blanchard featuring the E-Collective
When: 8 p.m. April 12
Where: Soka Performing Arts Center, 1 University Drive, Aliso Viejo
Admission: $48-$98; students and military, 10% off; free for those under 12
Tickets: 949-480-4278, soka.edu
Classical music coverage at Culture OC is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. Culture OC makes all editorial decisions.
