When I last spoke with Terence Blanchard, in 2015, I asked him to discuss the synergy between the detailed, painstaking process of composing movie soundtracks and the no-holds-barred approach to improvising he’s projected during a 38-year career as one of the world’s most esteemed jazz trumpeters and bandleaders.
“My jazz background allows me to think quickly on my feet in the film world,” Blanchard responded. “A given story contains various emotional components, and you see the limitless nature of music, how one idea, one through-line, can be expressed in so many ways. Some people think it’s limiting to stay within the context of the story, but it’s actually very liberating.”
Testifying to Blanchard’s ability to contextualize narrative with notes and tones is an end-of-2020 c.v. containing 100-plus film, television and theater scores. Many were commissioned by Spike Lee, beginning with Jungle Fever in 1991 and including high-profile works such as Malcolm X, Four Little Girls, Bamboozled, Inside Job, Chi-Raq and BlacKkKlansman, for which Blanchard earned a 2019 Oscar nomination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqWJw97Rjok
Most recently, Lee recruited Blanchard for Da 5 Bloods, a daring, sardonic Vietnam epic to which Blanchard applied a vivid symphonic canvas. Shortly after its June Netflix release, HBO aired the audaciously noirish eight-episode Perry Mason, set in Jim Crow Los Angeles at the height of the Great Depression in 1932. Blanchard conjured a novelistic score to propel and signify on the twists and turns of a multilayered narrative that reimagines the title character as a PTSD-afflicted World War I survivor, portrays his colleague Della Street as gay, and morphs his chief investigator Paul Drake into a Black man.
Add to Blanchard’s 2020 credits two directorial debuts: Bruised, by Halle Berry, who plays the lead as a traumatized boxer; and A Night in Miami, by 2019 Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Regina King, a well-acted ensemble piece portraying the course of a 1964 encounter between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in Malcolm’s motel room after Ali — then Cassius Clay — won the heavyweight championship of the world.
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One Night In Miami[/caption]
“I love the grandness, the emotional quality of Terence’s scores,” says Kasi Lemmons, who commissioned her fourth on the 2019 release Harriet, in which, under Lemmons’ direction, Anglo-Nigerian actress Cynthia Erivo inhabits Harriet Tubman’s persona. Lemmons concurrently wrote the libretto for Blanchard’s second opera, The Fire That Burns Within, initially staged by the St. Louis Opera in 2018, which is scheduled to open the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-22 season.
“Terence elevates whatever you’re trying to work on,” Lemmons says. “I told him that [Harriet] was my version of a superhero movie, and that the soul and driving momentum of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinner Man’ felt very appropriate. I talked to him about ancestors. He understood it, like he always does. He nailed it.”
Perry Mason’s executive producer and primary director, Tim Van Patten — who served that same function for four seasons of Boardwalk Empire after directing 20 episodes of The Sopranos — was similarly enthusiastic about Blanchard’s intuitive mojo. “Terence was completely dialed-in to the tone of this show — the narratives and identified themes,” Van Patten, says. “I’d give him a few notes and say, ‘Go for it.’ I felt no ego at all. He created a forensic arc, where you could track the characters through his music within the eight hours. He did what we call end title scores that commented emotionally on each individual episode and gave a nod to the next episode. That’s complicated stuff, and it’s a lot of writing. I’ve never come across that before. It blew my mind. I was in the hands of a master.”
Reached at his home in New Orleans in late September, Blanchard, 58, discussed his methods and the aesthetics of writing for the screen, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on his work.
Perry Mason isn’t a “Black” show, per se. It’s not associated with a Black director or an African-American theme.
People probably think a Black composer may not be right for that project. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s such a daring approach to a remake of Perry Mason — it was logical to try something daring for the music in post-production.
Tim told me, “We have to think of it like a long film with eight chapters.” The music had to take you on that journey as the episodes evolved. I didn’t want to do period music, which I thought would be too on the nose. Instead, I used elements from the early 1930s and tried to make them more contemporary. They found great locations, created a great look, the acting was amazing — everything was on point. All the emotional content was right on the screen. My job was to enhance it; there was no need to push any buttons or go deeper into anything.
How long did it take to write the score?
I started before COVID. It affected how we could record. For one thing, I probably would have had a big band, but instead I used five saxophones, string quartet, piano, bass, drums and myself. Normally we’d have a bunch of musicians play together in the room, the engineer mixes it and then sends it off. Instead, everybody did everything individually. We’d send their parts to an editor, who put them in ProTools and made sure everything lined up. Then we’d send that to a mixer. It was pretty arduous.
In distinction to your other recent soundtracks, you play a fair amount of trumpet.
Yes, on every episode I’m playing someplace. That wasn’t at all what I set out to do. But COVID limited the number of musicians I could use at a session, and I couldn’t be in the room with someone else if a lead instrument was needed — so I felt it was up to me to be lead voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTmYwbRhgk
A very different ambiance than One Night in Miami.
Initially I gave Regina King some Latin-based and blues-based demos. But she kept coming back to bluesy, jazz-based solo piano with a gospel influence. I immediately thought Benny Green would be perfect, and sent him thematic ideas. Once Regina started to hear where I was going, we got into more detail about what the piano should do improvisationally during specific scenes. There is the main theme. There is the Malcolm X theme that starts off when he’s praying, where I introduce the duduk [double-reed wind instrument]. The main theme winds up being a more playful thing for Cassius Clay. With Jim Brown, it’s introspective; with Sam Cooke it’s fun-loving. There are a couple of other transitional groove-based things. I also generated some atmospheric stuff, and there’s a song in the front that I wrote with [New Orleans-based band] Tank and the Bangas and Keb’ Mo’, the great blues guitarist, that Jim Brown listens to while he’s driving through Georgia. But the main focus of the score is piano.
I love that the film portrays these four African-American men expressing various modes of thinking that we experience in our community that are all very valid. In my mind, the score is another character — a character of unity, like the conscience of the characters. It’s right there with all the action, but it isn’t underscoring everything. It’s not trying to make huge statements. It’s another tone.
It’s a different sonic approach from Bruised, where I use a lot of atmospheric tones, but most of the score is centered around cello, played by Malcolm Parson, who is part of the Turtle Island String Quartet. I recently recorded an album of Wayne Shorter’s music with them and the E-Collective — we’re still trying to figure out how to release it. Since we couldn’t be in a studio, I sent things to Malcolm, he’d record and send them back. I’d mix them into my session with everything else I had going on — rhythmic, sonic, harmonic — and send to Halle for critiques. It’s a brooding score, because Halle’s character is struggling through some dark elements to find herself on the other side of what she’s going through in her life. It’s very powerful.
For Da 5 Bloods you used a 90-piece orchestra, as you’d done some years before on Spike Lee’s Miracle at Saint Anna. Talk about your process.
It was like working on anything Spike sends my way. First I step back a second, because I’m captivated by what I’m watching. With 90 pieces, you have room to shape colors and tones that can constantly evolve and grow, and then diminish, and then grow again. At the beginning of the session, with 90 people sitting in front of you, there’s always this nerve-wracking moment, hoping that all the music is right. But then you get the incredible experience of feeling the power of 90 people play something you’ve written. By the way, young African-American musicians came from all over to be part of that session — some from Canada, some from New York, some from Mexico.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNsAcQUliBQ
Spike uses source music to cover the period and location, so I never have to worry about that, even though I may use some of those elements in the score. Here, the songs from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On made total sense. I was thinking: How do I make this a grand story? How do I rise to the occasion? That opening sequence, where the helicopter is shot down, has so much information, it took me five days to score it — three days to plot it out on piano, the next few days to orchestrate it. That set the tone for the rest of the film. My job is to connect the audience to the characters themselves. For example, for the theme with Clarke Peters [Otis] and the woman he had the child with, Tiên, I bring in the duduk. The music shows Otis’ softer side — and actually a bit of his comedic side — when he sees the young girl and starts to drink the wine. Even though Tiên hasn’t said anything, we know what’s going on as soon as the girl walks into the frame.
How did Kasi Lemmons present Harriet to you?
That she saw Harriet Tubman as a superhero, that it wasn’t a slave film — only in the first five minutes does Harriet deal with slavery in the form we normally see. The rest is about Harriet’s journey, how she became this incredibly strong woman on a mission to save all these souls. The first scene where she crosses the river is the one that informed me what the film should be.
Everyone on Harriet felt we had to do 110 percent. During the shooting, whenever someone got weak or tired, we’d think: Harriet Tubman was a diminutive woman but her energy and spirit was boundless. We kept that in front of us as motivation. No one talked about anything extraneous. It was: “What are we going to do for Harriet?” People probably will refer to this film for many years. It may be used in classrooms to teach about Harriet Tubman. When you think about it on that scale, you can freak out a bit. The last time that happened to me was when I did Malcolm X for Spike. Everybody was a little nervous. [Cinematographer] Wynn Thomas told me: “Look, we all want to do 150 percent, but if we want to do that, the best thing is to do our jobs.” That calmed me down. I thought about it during Harriet: “OK, let me do what I have been doing and focus on helping tell the story.”
Kasi Lemmons also wrote the libretto for your second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, adapted from Charles Blow’s memoir.
Kasi told me she loved opera when I first worked with her on [1997’s] Eve’s Bayou; we talked about this opera when we spoke about Harriet. I’ve always loved her writing, and I knew she’d write something fantastic. Opera Theater of St. Louis brought Charles, Kasi and myself to St. Louis for a meeting. Kasi followed Charles everywhere, like a super-sleuth investigator, asking questions. So I knew she’d come up with ideas. When she started creating the imagery with Jim Robinson, the director, it set me thinking what I might do for the different characters. Now that it’s going to the Metropolitan Opera, we’ll meet again to make changes and develop some of the characters.
I’ve seen clips on YouTube that show a demotic, vernacular libretto. Does the score mirror that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmb1NbVcik
No, I wouldn’t say that. My composition teacher, Roger Dickerson, told me years ago that my respective experiences as a jazz musician and a film composer will probably come together in a way that I couldn’t yet envision. He said: “You should think about how to notate some of those things you do in jazz for the orchestra.”
That’s what I thought about when it came time to write Fire Shut Up in My Bones. I tried to draw upon all my experiences as a musician — from jazz, from orchestras, from teaching — to hopefully create something a little different in the opera world. I thought about Benny Golson. I thought about all the great jazz artists who have come before me. I thought about some of the great classical voices I’ve heard. And I tried to write something that would have the flow of a jazz composition and the strong melodic content of great classical American music. Puccini’s La Boheme is one of my favorite operas, and one thing that blows my mind every time I listen to it — which happens in old American musicals, too — is how the melody develops like the words do. How they’re so intertwined. I didn’t want my opera to sound like I was jerking off just to try to make a musical point. I wanted to marry the development of the melodic line to the emotional development of the words being sung. That’s more important to me than anything.
Does your process for opera differ from your process for film?
With opera, I might sit at the piano for a day, trying to find a rhythm that makes sense for a couple of lines. On films, I have less time to flesh those things out. I’m sitting at my keyboard, surrounded by all my other colors and instruments.
Most of your development as a composer was not the product of formal study at an institution of higher learning. You were a working musician when you attended Rutgers.
During high school, I studied with Dr. Bert Braud at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and then privately with Roger Dickerson. Both are brilliant and taught me all my techniques without opening a book. They gave me the rules and wrote out the lessons in a notebook. Roger was so adept at knowing what I needed to hear, what I needed to work on.
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Terence Blanchard (second from left) with the Jazz Messengers in 1985.[/caption]
When we did my first opera, Champion, in Washington, D.C., I flew out Roger and his wife. The second night, we went to dinner with friends; one of them asked him really intricate questions. Roger started out saying, “You know, four-bar phrases are the death knell of creativity.” I went, “Damn, I thought that was my idea.” Every time he said something I’d think, “Wow, I thought that was mine, too.” So I started to realize how much this guy influenced my life. He helped shape my thinking in all areas. Later, I read Paul Hindemith’s The Craft of Musical Composition, and found that everything Roger taught me was in that book! Roger said: “You were a kid, just 16 years old. So I figured out ways to give you the same information.”
In past conversations, you’ve described learning to play jazz by listening to one thing in granular detail, rather than studying a lot of different things. Was this your process in becoming a film composer?
The exact same thing. Denzel Washington took me to the [1989] premiere of Glory. Then I got the soundtrack, listened to it over and over, and started to break it down into core elements. Once I got one thing, I’d move on to another. Then I became a big fan of Thomas Newman’s score to Shawshank Redemption and did the same thing. I listened over and over to the cue from the scene where James Whitmore hung himself. It’s simplistic, but very beautiful.
I’m that nerd, man. My kids and my wife laugh at me. Even when I’m not working, if I’m not practicing or watching sports, I’m online reading about gear, or reading about processes, or reading about something — trying to learn and get better. I don’t have a team of people like some others do. It’s just me. So I need to constantly fine-tune. Years ago, I saw a Magic Johnson interview where he said that, every off-season, he tried to add something to his game. I try to do that as a musician. After I finish Bruised, I’m going to get back into practicing. Because of COVID, I don’t have any performances. So I’ll have time to sit down and focus on some things. I’m excited.
As a kid in New Orleans, you played piano before you were serious about the trumpet. Any remarks on your piano background and the impact of your father’s musical taste and character and personality on the way you function?
I started playing piano when I was 5 years old, because my grandmother had a piano at the house and I’d always try to find some sounds in it. Then they started me on lessons. In my house, we heard operatic music and classical music. So my early musical upbringing was based on a classical sensibility. The jazz that I heard was Oscar Peterson and André Previn on the Tonight Show or some televised production.
My father was an insurance salesman. He was great with numbers, and would play little math games with me. He loved music, and he was a workaholic. That’s probably why I’m the way I am now. If my father wasn’t working on balancing the books from his insurance accounts, he was sitting at the piano, going through music he had to sing that weekend in church or at a performance. He was a one-finger piano player. He’d sing his part, then play the tenor part against what he’d sung, then play the alto and soprano parts. Essentially, he knew everybody’s part. I thought he was nuts. But later I realized that he had a serious passion for music. Sometimes he’d put on an opera: “Hey, hey, boy, come here; sit down, listen ... . Now listen to those strings. You see how the oboe comes in right there?” It’s almost like he was planting the seed within me to do opera now, without my even realizing it.
I recall a remark you made that your father and Roger Dickerson, Ellis Marsalis and Alvin Batiste gave you models for successful African-American men in that particular moment.
Nobody had money. Nobody was living a lavish lifestyle. But that didn’t diminish their passion or love for what they were into. They were men of integrity who worked their hardest to be the best they could at whatever they were doing. When I was young, that’s just who they were to me. I didn’t know any better. When I was around Ellis or Roger, it was the same energy as being around my dad, or my Uncle Rick, who sang with my dad, or a guy at my church, Osceola Blanchet, who taught operatic music to my dad and all these other Black men in New Orleans. Or being around [saxophonist] Kidd Jordan, who was totally different than those dudes, but just as passionate for what he did as they were for what they did. They all appreciated each other. I feel blessed that those images in early life helped shape who I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j84o3GuL8w
Given the scope of your recent activity, do you feel very conscious about your status as one of a fairly small number of Black film composers?
I don’t want to ever be the guy who dropped the ball. Benny Golson, Oliver Nelson, all those dudes broke their backs for me to have this opportunity — even though they did it for me inadvertently. That’s the fear when I’m standing in front of a 90-piece orchestra. I’m not going to be the guy who’s unorganized, who seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
I used to joke with Marcus Miller that we couldn’t be in the same room at the same time, because if the building blows up there’s two-thirds of the Black film composers gone. It’s an awful joke to tell, but it reflects the reality. And now, it’s not just about African-Americans, but also women — more people getting opportunities to score. They’re bringing different sensibilities, which is cool. I used to ask Miles Goodman about helping me learn more about film scoring, and he said: “No, I’m not going to work with you. Your weaknesses are your strengths. You’re going to bring something different to the world of film. If I teach you, you may wind up doing some similar things as I do. I don’t want that. Your uniqueness is what the film world needs.”
