Terence Blanchard

Terence Blanchard composed the scores for Talk to Me filmmaker Kasi Lemmons' first two features, Eve's Bayou and The Caveman's Valentine.
The Grammy Award-winning trumpeter/composer's two most recent albums, "Flow" and "Bounce," were released on the legendary Blue Note Records label. Among his prior albums are "Let's Get Lost," "Wandering Moon," "The Heart Speaks," and "Simply Stated." In addition to his Grammy win last year for his collaboration on McCoy Tyner's "Illuminations" album, he has been nominated four additional times.
The New Orleans native first picked up the trumpet in elementary school, and was also coached at home by his opera-singing father. In high school, he came under the tutelage of Ellis Marsalis. After graduating, he attended Rugters University on a music scholarship. One of his professors soon helped get him a touring gig with Lionel Hampton's band. Wynton Marsalis later recommended Mr. Blanchard as his replacement in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
A subsequent stint in a quintet was followed by a solo career - now well into its second decade - that has expanded to encompass bandleading as well as film and television score compositions.
Mr. Blanchard has worked with Talk to Me's Vondie Curtis Hall as composer of the director's scores for the recent Rogue Pictures release Waist Deep, as well as Glitter and Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story. Other films he has scored include Ron Shelton's Dark Blue; Tim Story's Barbershop; Daniel Algrant's People I Know; and Gina Prince-Bythewood's Love and Basketball.
He continues to enjoy an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker Spike Lee, scoring 12 of the latter's feature films - among them Inside Man, 25th Hour (for which the score earned a Golden Globe Award nomination), Summer of Sam, 4 Little Girls, Malcolm X, and Jungle Fever - as well as performing as a featured musician on Mo' Better Blues and Do the Right Thing. Most recently, Mr. Blanchard scored Mr. Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts in addition to participating in the project on-camera with interviews and off-camera with (ongoing) aid efforts in his home city.

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