Photo by Jackson Hill

Terence Blanchard became Spike Lee’s chief film composer with Jungle Fever (1991). Both Blanchard and Lee went for an epic feel the next year with Malcolm X, a sweeping biography of the controversial civil rights leader.
Blanchard does a remarkable job of creating an aural presence with his score without overwhelming the film. That’s easier said than done with a stylist such as Lee, who has a very distinct (and sometimes not too subtle) vision in his work. Compare Blanchard with Bill Lee (Spike’s father), whose work on Do the Right Thing was at times flat-out intrusive.
The collaboration has continued through the past decade. Along the way, Blanchard has also worked with other directors, including Kasi Lemmons on Eve’s Bayou (1997), creating a new set of challenges.

Was Malcolm X a breakthrough for you? There was a great scope to the film, and the music matched that epic feel.
I liken doing Malcolm X to when I first joined Art Blakey’s band. When I first joined Art Blakey’s band, I’m telling ya, bra’, I felt like I grew 40 years because of the intense level of musicianship, right? Not only the musicianship with which you played, but how many times you played during the week. It’s like going from the NCAA to the NBA. The schedule is just hellacious with some top-notch players.
The same thing happened with Malcolm X. I went from doing Jungle Fever, which is a nice film, to doing this big-ass, 30-something million-dollar movie. …

And it’s only Malcolm X.
Right! And there’s all this controversy going around. People were calling me about it before the movie’s damn near shot. And I’m sitting there freaking, like, this guy is entrusting this with me?
My biggest challenge in doing Malcolm X was to be honest to myself about how I felt about Malcolm X. Because I felt like most people probably felt about him. The first time I heard Malcolm X, it was probably not too far from here, and we were doing a summer jazz festival playing in a park with Willie Metcalf. And on a break, they put on a Malcolm X record. Scared the shit out of me. Scared me to death. I was a kid, man.

How old were you?
I must’ve been about 15, 16, and the thing about it was, it was deep, because, he was talking about blue-eyed devils — they put on like the real radical stuff. You know what I mean? And everybody’s up there going, “Yeah, yeah!” and I was freakin’, ’cause I’m going, where the hell am I? What is this? And I kind of figured that was most people’s reaction when they heard him in that period.
It wasn’t until I learned more about the guy and read up on him that I started to understand how impressed I was with him as being a man, because he understood his mistakes and he admitted them to the world, and did everything he could to change those things, right? So there’s a certain kind of honesty there. And there’s a certain kind of passion that I had for him as a person. That’s what I tapped into to write the music.

How do you think you’ve grown as a composer in the nine years since then?
I think I’ve grown a lot in my orchestrations. The way I’ve combined instruments to create textures and colors. And I think that I’ve grown more patient. I’m not afraid just to let the scenes do what they’re supposed to do. One of the things about film scoring, it’s like playing jazz. You play with better players, you get better. And sometimes I’ve worked on films that weren’t that great, and those films tend to make you think you can’t do this job (laughs), because you try to bring something out of a scene that’s just not there.

How hard is it to provide music for someone else’s vision?
You know it’s funny, because people always ask me about that. They say, man, it must be hard to write film music, and it’s actually the opposite. It’s harder to write from my own situation because then I got to be honest and be really forthcoming. I got to face up to some issues musically and emotionally.
I’m not the kind of guy who just wants to write a tune. But when you work on a film, if the film is really good, and I tell students this all the time, when you watch the movie, you get a sense of what is happening with the movie. You start working on the movie, you get into a scene, you look at the scene, it has a rhythm throughout all of that. And it starts to come to you, it starts to speak to you, it starts to say, I need this here, I need this there. And it’s almost like painting by the numbers in a sense, but you paint with your own colors. I mean, you could make a parrot just using black, shit that you want.

What was the hardest film to “paint”?
The horrible ones. I’m not gonna tell you.

OK. What was the most challenging film you scored that you liked?
It’s kind of egotistical to say this, but the last two films that I worked on, The Caveman’s Valentine and Original Sin. For very different reasons. Caveman’s Valentine, I knew what the film needed, but it was just hard. I mean, I’d never written piano concertos, I’ve never done that kind of stuff. That was challenging to try to do that in such a short period of time. I didn’t have a year to sit down and work on a piano piece. And then to take some of those pieces of music and then use them as a score without interrupting the flow of the film was challenging.
This other film, Original Sin, was a challenge because it’s set in Cuba in the 1850s. You know what was hard about that movie? It’s that Cuban music in the 1800s is not what people think of Cuban music. People think of Cuban music as a very rhythmical, percussive kind of thing. It wasn’t that at all. It was danzon. Very pianistic, waltz kind of music. The challenge there was to flux that issue a bit, and try to figure out how to bring in some elements of music that actually occurred later on in Cuba.

Do you study up on music for any given film?
A little bit, a little bit. For that film, I listened to some [Louis Moreau] Gottschalk, who was an American composer who dealt with that form.

The lead character in Caveman, Romulus (played by Samuel L. Jackson), is a homeless man who was once a composer. Did you relate to his character at all?
The thing which I related to most was that he was a very honest person, and that’s how you want to be considered, as an honest man. It doesn’t mean he was right; his vision was skewed. He tried to deal with those issues the best way he could. He didn’t fit his life into where he was at.
That’s one of the reasons I’m a musician. When you’re composing you have to be honest with what you want to say, because that’s what people want to hear. The listening public knows when you’re cheating them.

I wonder what it would be like to have you watch The Caveman’s Valentine and deconstruct your creative process scene by scene.
The hard thing about that for me is that when I’m watching the film, I really want to be engrossed, not only by what I score, but the spaces in between — the pieces of music, and how I come in and out of those things. That’s something that’s been really on my mind a lot lately.

Why?
The music has to be seamless. There are some times where (snaps his finger) you have to make an entrance, let your presence be known. But basically, music is not supposed to be noticed in a film. It’s there, it’s the emotional things. It’s the thing that makes you cry when you don’t want to cry. Or the thing that pisses you off because something happened. Or the thing that makes you know somebody’s about to get their ass kicked.

Though you’ve been scoring films for a decade now, you have yet to receive an Oscar nomination. Do you think that working with Spike Lee has been a hindrance there, because the Academy doesn’t seem to respect his work much?
I don’t know about that in terms of being nominated. I know sometimes it can be detrimental in terms of me getting work. I was up for a major film one time, and the director actually said to a friend of mine, my mentor (the late composer and scorer Miles Goodman), and Miles said, “You should hire Terence.” And he said, “I love Terence’s music, but I hate Spike’s films.” So I didn’t get the job.
That doesn’t bug me. I think it’s unfortunate that somebody can be that short-sighted. It was unfortunate to know that someone lived their life like that. Because I thought they were a little hipper than that.

But are you disappointed that you haven’t been recognized by the Academy?
No, not at all. I didn’t get even into this business for that.
What composers have influenced you?
Stravinsky. I know everyone says that. It’s the popular thing to say, but The Rite of Spring is one of my favorite pieces, it just comes to life. I’m amazed by that piece.
When I first started writing film music, I thought of the orchestra as like separate parts that worked together. We were doing Mo’ Better Blues, and I had written one scene for orchestra. And I had a great feeling standing there conducting 70 people playing something for the first time. And I remember walking out of the RCA studio, and walking up the hall to go to the bathroom, and there was an engineer in another room who was mastering Rite of Spring, for a subsequent release, and it was right at one of the very percussive parts of that piece, and it just shattered everything that I’d experienced standing in front of that orchestra. When I heard that piece, it was like a live animal charging right at me. It wasn’t some dainty piece. It was raw.

How do your two worlds — jazz musician and film composer — affect each other creatively?
Being a jazz musician and being able to think on my feet (snaps his finger) and improvise helps me a great deal in the film world. Because you can get in the studio and all of a sudden the director says, “Hey man, that was cool, but …” (snaps finger). Whenever I hear “but,” man, that “but” is a big one. They think it’s not. It’s either “but,” or “can it be …?” It’s a big thing. Being able to be flexible and move and change really helps me a great deal.
In my jazz work, the film career really helps me understand what it’s like to tell a story. Not only in playing my solos, and not only just playing one tune, but just an entire show, whether it be a concert or an entire album, if it’s some kind of recording. It’s all about imagery, and how does that imagery work musically?

With Let’s Get Lost, several film scores, the Thelonius Monk Institute and some other possible projects taking shape, Terence Blanchard remains in constant motion. His immediate concern, Let’s Get Lost, is similar to Jazz in Film in its fluid quality despite having several different female vocalists, along with his own instrumentals interpreting McHugh’s songs. It’s yet another indication of his forward motion as an artist.

Much has been said about the melodic quality of your trumpet playing. Did you decide on Jimmy McHugh because of his melodic songwriting, such as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “I’m in the Mood for Love”? Did you listen to him as a kid?
Naw. But I knew those songs. It’s not like you go out and you say, “OK, I’m gonna go listen to Jimmy McHugh’s tunes.” You start to realize, oh, he wrote that? Wow, he wrote that tune? The other thing about it along with that, the people who’ve recorded his tunes run the gamut. It’s like, you have Louis Armstrong, you have John Coltrane, the Mills Brothers, you know what I mean? That fascinates me that somebody can write something that’s that malleable, to be used in so many musical styles.
For Let’s Get Lost: Jane Monheit, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, Diana Krall. Was there a rhyme and a reason to the selection of the vocalists?
Well, I knew I wanted some of those folks on the record. Basically, it was just having some of the young hot talent. I coulda went for Abbey Lincoln, or Freddy Cole, some of those folks. But we’re trying to get some of the people from my generation. I’ve been knowing Cassandra since she was in Mississippi. I’ve known Dianne Reeves for a long time, since I was playing with Art Blakey.

When are you gonna start slowing down?
I’m slowing down this week. This is my week. Actually last week. This is Tuesday.

Yeah, but for how long?
Last week. That was it. (laughs). Now this week I have to get back on the stick.

So you like this pace?
Look, you know what it’s like? It’s a sickness. You know, you sit there and say, “OK, I wanna take some time off,” till somebody comes up with something that you just can’t resist, and you go, “Really? That sounds interesting.” You know, “Sounds cool.” Like some people can’t believe that I’m working with Mariah Carey (in All That Glitters), you know? But to me, it’s an interesting process. It’s a different world. It’s not about the money, because I’ve made more money working on other films.

Any plans for a recording after Let’s Get Lost?
Yeah, I have a coupla things that I’m mulling over in my mind.

What would they be?
Well, I, you know … we’ll see (chuckles). We’ll see.

What’s Spike’s new project?
Uh, I’m not sure yet (laughs).

Yeah you are.
I can’t tell you (laughs again).

But you are going to start slowing down, or no?
Naw. Naw.