Photo by Jackson Hill

Any year could be Terence Blanchard’s year. As one of jazz’s most respected trumpeters, he is also one of the jazz world’s hardest-working film composers, serving as director Spike Lee’s chief music collaborator for the past decade.

But in the year 2000, Blanchard began the millennium by setting a new standard for himself. After spending several years of reinterpreting other artists’ work or collaborating with others on their material, Blanchard broke out with the all-original Wandering Moon, which earned him a Grammy nomination for best jazz instrumental solo (“I Thought About You”). The album led to a hat trick of sorts when he won three awards in Down Beat magazine’s year-end poll: best album, best artist, and best trumpeter, beating out fellow New Orleanians Wynton Marsalis and Nicholas Payton.

The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts graduate also began teaching students at the University of Southern California’s Thelonius Monk Institute. When he wasn’t touring, he hooked up with his old friend and film-scoring colleague Jay Weigel, executive director of the Contemporary Arts Center. They began a residency that spawned the “Jazz America” series, to bring top-name jazz acts such as Danilo Perez and Nnenna Freelon to a non-nightclub venue.

On top of all that, Blanchard worked on seven different film scores (including Lee’s latest, Bamboozled), and reunited with director Kasi Lemmons (Eye’s Bayou) on the recently released The Caveman’s Valentine. He can’t name all seven of the films he worked on last year (“I just remember the number,” he shrugs), yet another indication of just how busy he is.

He’s still active this year. He takes monthly trips to Los Angeles to teach at USC. Upcoming Blanchard scores include Original Sin (with Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas) and All That Glitters (featuring Mariah Carey’s acting debut). Then there’s the May release of Let’s Get Lost, a collaboration with some of jazz’s great singers (Diana Krall, Cassandra Wilson and others) covering the work of songwriter Jimmy McHugh. And, of course, the touring.

Late last month, Blanchard had just enough time to sit down for an interview in the Garden District home he shares with his wife and manager, Robin Burgess, and their four children. As an assistant sat nearby, the sound of children and phones ringing forced Blanchard to occasionally crane his neck.
Only 39, Blanchard talks like the seasoned jazz veteran that he is, the same man who replaced Marsalis in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers at the age of 19 before striking out on his own with fellow New Orleanian Donald Harrison Jr. If there is any physical sign of his age, it’s in the flecks of gray atop his closely cropped hairdo. Otherwise, the years have been kind to him, even if his schedule isn’t.

You’ve always kept yourself busy. But is this the busiest you’ve ever been?
This is the craziest it’s ever been. My day is filled with trying to tackle issues in some area of my musical life, you know what I mean? And it’s very rare that I have a day that I can just do nothing.

Even on the weekends, my mind is still focused on trying to solve some issue, whether it be a film that I’m working on, whether it be what it is I’m practicing, what I’m gonna write for my band, on what I need to do to help the students at the Thelonius Monk Institute get their thing together. Or how best to promote the concerts here for the residency. Now I have a record coming out in May. Plus I have four kids.

Did you know what you were getting into?
When I started doing the film thing, I thought that that was crazy to have two careers, you know, because I was really devoted to being a jazz musician and performer. And [when] I started doing the film thing, I didn’t think that it would grow to this level. I thought I’d do a couple films with Spike, and then that would kind of be it. Now it’s evolved into this whole other career.

What happened is that you start to learn how to best utilize your time. I start to compartmentalize every aspect of my life. And then you take on other things, you start to see oh, well, I could put this here. And then when you do that, you make sure you focus all your energy on that. You don’t wanna slight anything.

When did the Wandering Moon tour end?
It’s never-ending. We’ve been out on the road all year last year, most of the beginning of this year, and we’ll continue on the road through May, and [Let’s Get Lost] comes out in May. So people say, “Oh, so when does the tour start?” And I say, “When does the record come out?”

Do you feel particularly prolific right now?
No. I don’t think of myself as being that way. I just look at it as being interested in projects that I want to tackle. ’Cause I’m tellin’ ya, man, soon as you finish a record … I don’t know what it is, but when you hit the last note, it’s like you start thinking about the next one. Because you’re thinking about all the mistakes and all the stuff you thought you wanted to do on this record that you didn’t accomplish. So that becomes the basis of the next project.

Several years ago, Terence Blanchard was onstage with his band doing the usual mix of originals and standards, and decided that his writing wasn’t quite up to snuff. So he looked at some of the greats and started recasting their work through his arrangements to see what might be missing.
The result was an impressive trio of albums: The Billie Holiday Songbook (1994); The Heart Speaks (1995), a Grammy-nominated collaboration with Brazilian composer-singer Ivan Lins; and Jazz in Film (1999), an interpretation of jazz-influenced film scores.

With Wandering Moon, he returned to his hard-bop roots. Along with his regular band of alto saxist Aaron Fletcher, tenor saxist Brice Winston, pianist Ed Simon and drummer Eric Harland, Blanchard recruited fellow New Orleanian Branford Marsalis on tenor sax and Dave Holland on bass. The result was a swirling blend of improvisation and collaboration, with Blanchard feeling perfectly at home inside his compositions and solos.

You’ve said that you spent the past several years exploring some of the greats in jazz to improve your own songwriting ability. With Wandering Moon, were you coming full circle?
In a sense, yeah. Wandering Moon was a manifestation of all of my efforts up until that point. But I’m still dealing with those things. I just did the music of Jimmy McHugh for this next record, and I listened to all of that music.
Being a jazz musician, you always have to struggle between your brain and your heart. Your brain is telling you that you want to do something different and something that is cutting edge, and be able to affect people. Your heart is telling you that a million people can’t be wrong; that they’ve been responding to these tunes and these melodies for years and years and years, and there has to be a reason for that.

So your challenge, then, is to recast this music in your own jazz idiom, compared to how somebody else has done it.
The whole thing is you don’t even want to think about how anybody else has done it. That’s one of the key things when I was doing the music. We were selecting songs, and the producer sent me a CD of all of the material so we could have something to choose from. And that was cool, but I said, hey, can you send me the music? ’Cause I don’t want to be affected by listening to somebody else’s arrangements.

Why not do another album of all originals?
Well, part of that is just like I was telling you: it’s an ongoing process of re-evaluating yourself. When I was younger, I used to look at myself as a guy who was just going to be this jazz composer, who was going to compose this music that was so on the cutting edge, that was going to lead this whole new tradition of playing compositional jazz. OK, that’s a very lofty ambition, you know what I mean? The practical side of that is, there’s a lot of growth and research that has to occur at the same time.

So [when] you’re researching something, you realize how much you’ve grown. In the growth process, you realize how much you still have yet to learn.

And by that you find your own voice, too?
Oh yeah. That’s part of the thing that’s amazing for me as an artist. This is a thing I try to tell younger musicians. When they get signed to labels, they get pressured into doing an album of standards. And they think it’s such a drag. And my thing is, why is it a drag? They didn’t tell you how to do it. Nobody’s gonna give you an arrangement, nobody’s gonna stand over you with a whip and say play it this way.

And when you listen to some of the greatest records that have been made in this idiom, there have been some great records made of standard material by some great musicians who’ve done some very interesting things with them.

In all of your work, you seem very comfortable exploring your craft while sharing the spotlight — as opposed to being someone who only follows his own vision.
When I was a kid growing up, I was always into the notion of collaboration. I don’t know what it was. Just the whole notion of two minds being better than one. Because there are so many other things that you can overlook inadvertently.

So for me working with other folks stretches me a bit. When I’m working on a film, I know how I approach a certain situation musically. But it’s always interesting to get somebody else’s take on the same issue.

Why?
Because they may have a totally different view of what’s possible, which really keeps me open to the millions of possibilities that are available to any composer.