Terence Blanchard

Terence Blanchard

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TERENCE BLANCHARD SCORES
Ace Trumpeter Revisits Favorite Movie Music with 'Jazz in Film'
Trumpeter Terence Blanchard simultaneously balances two careers: jazz musician and film composer (he just finished the score to Spike Lee's upcoming "Summer of Sam," his fifth score for Lee). His excellent new album, JAZZ IN FILM, brings those two careers together, as Blanchard and a band featuring saxophonist Joe Henderson perform the jazz-influenced themes from such films as " A Streetcar Named Desire," "Anatomy of a Murder," "The Subterraneans," and Blanchard's own "Clockers." Recently, Blanchard sat down to talk with Lee Jeske of barnesandnoble.com about his dual careers.

barnesandnoble.com: Before you started working with Spike Lee, how aware were you of film music?

Terence Blanchard: Not at all. I wasn't into it, wasn't aware of it, it didn't concern me. When I heard the score to "Star Wars," I remember, just being a brass player, that that was an amazing score. And I remember hearing the score to "Chinatown" because it's trumpet. Those things caught my attention, but other than that, I wasn't a film fan, I was a jazz guy.

bn: When you started doing the first score, did you actually sit down and listen to film scores and watch films?

TB: Definitely. The first score that I actually studied was the score to GLORY. Spike really loved the score and he said, "Look, man, this is the kind of sound I want for "MALCOM X." After seeing the movie, I went and got the CD and -- the same thing you do with jazz records -- you sit down and you take off the score, just like you take off solos, and just break it down to the bare essence. Not just film scores, I even went out and got the music to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and started studying that. I just looked at scores and listened to some orchestral music and just tried to get a better understanding of that stuff.

bn: How did you select the pieces for JAZZ IN FILM?

TB: The whole idea was to find things that were based in the tradition of jazz and were important in defining definite moments or definite shifts in film scoring; to try to pick the jazz compositions that paved the way for different types of film scoring. So, there were a couple of definite choices: "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Chinatown," "Taxi Driver," and "Anatomy of a Murder." We knew that those had to be on the record. And the rest of them were just a matter of picking things that we thought were appropriate.

bn: One of them is Quincy Jones's theme for "The Pawnbroker." Quincy says that at the time Sidney Lumet hired him it was really a big risk: to hire a black composer from a jazz background. Are there still elements of that?

TB: Oh, definitely. Nothing has really changed that much as far as that kind of stuff is concerned. For example, after I did "Malcom X" people were asking my agent, "Well, we're interested in using him for our film. Is he black?" The common comment that I get now is there are two reasons I don't get hired. The first reason is that I'm a jazz musician and they think I want to write long extended solos over dialogue for everything. And the second is because I work with Spike.

bn: No matter how successful your film career gets, it's important to you to maintain your jazz career, isn't it?

TB: When I first started doing this, there was a kind of a backlash -- there was something about me becoming a film composer: Maybe I didn't want to be a jazz musician anymore. And my answer was, "Look, with all of the shit that you go through being a jazz musician, and the amount of money I get paid being a film composer, if I'm still playing jazz then I must love playing this music."

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