Terence Oliver Blanchard, Sr., composer, conductor, and trumpeter, was born on March 13, 1962, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Joseph O. Blanchard, an insurance business manager and opera singer, and Wilhelmina Blanchard. Terence began piano lessons at the age of five, and by the age of eight, he had picked up the trumpet. At the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, he continued his music studies on brass instruments. Blanchard attended Loyola University’s summer music programs while attending St. Augustine High School, a black Catholic school.
He did, however, leave St. Augustine and attend John F. Kennedy High School in New Orleans, where he graduated in 1980. Blanchard studied music at Rutgers University from 1980 to 1982, and in 1982 he joined the Lionel Hampton Orchestra for a year before joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers until 1986. Blanchard released Music From “Mo Better Blues” with the Branford Marsalis Quartet in 1990, which includes “Mo’ Better Blues,” which peaked at number 63 and lasted on the charts for 14 weeks.
Blanchard’s self-titled first album for Columbia Records was published in 1991, and it peaked at number three on the Billboard Jazz Charts. Blanchard was appointed artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 2000.
Blanchard was named Artist-in-Residence at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2007. In 2008, he received a Grammy Award for “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album” for A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina). Blanchard also played alligator Louis’ trumpet sections in the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog. In 2011, he was named artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami. In 2012, he was awarded honorary degrees from Xavier University of New Orleans and Skidmore College in New York. In 2017, Blanchard received an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music.
Blanchard’s opera “Champion” received its world premiere in 2013 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Blanchard was named a visiting scholar in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music two years later, and his album Breathless received a Grammy nomination. In addition, he was nominated for an Academy Award in 2018 for his work on Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman’s “Best Original Score.” Blanchard was named a USA Fellow in the same year, receiving a $50,000 unrestricted award and being recognized as the most compelling artist working and living.
His opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on the novel by Charles M. Blow, had its world premiere in 2019 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. He also composed the score for the 2019 Harriet Tubman documentary Harriet, and the following year, 2020, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Lee’s film, Da 5 Bloods.
Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones became the first operatic work written by an African American composer to be performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera since its inception in 1839 in 2021.
Terence Oliver Blanchard, Sr., who has written scores for over 40 films, is still a professor at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music, where he holds the Kenny Burrell Chair in Jazz Studies. In 1996, he married Robin Burgess. They have four children between them.