Jazz Goes to the Movies

By David E. Thigpen

Halfway through song from his new tribute album, The Billie Holiday Songbook, trumpeter Terence Blanchard abruptly shifts the mood from brokenhearted to defiant. Reflecting the emotions of a jilted lover, he blows swirling, gathering clouds of sound. Then, suddenly piercing them with a barrage of sharp notes, he dashes off a few steeply ascending riffs, bending his notes until they cry and yowl. Throughout the album, on solo after solo (Strange Fruit, In My Solitude), Blanchard's compact, mournful-sounding melodies evoke the desperation and broken dreams that tortured Holiday, who died at 44 in 1959 of drugs and drink.

Few can match Blanchard's precision and flair in evoking emotion. In the course of two albums on his own, and five others with various collaborators, he has developed an expressive style reminiscent of the mid-1960s Miles Davis. He has also distinguished himself by his sideline as one of Hollywood's busiest composers: three movies with Blanchard scores -- Sugar Hill, Inkwell and Crooklyn -- are now playing in theaters.

Born in New Orleans, Blanchard grew up saturated in music. His father was an insurance man and aspiring opera singer, and his early career paralleled that of Wynton Marsalis, another hometown musician. Blanchard studied composition and classical and jazz trumpet at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, then moved to New York City, where he landed one of jazz's most enviable jobs: trumpeter in the Art Blakey Band.

Unlike Marsalis, who devotes equal time to classical music, Blanchard turned himself fully to jazz. He recorded five albums with saxophonist Donald Harrison (beginning with New York Second Line in 1984) and then two others leading his own quintet (Terence Blanchard and Simply Stated, both released in 1991). In the New York City club scene, he established himself as a composer and soloist with a silvery tone and a gift for majestic phrasing.

It is as a film composer that Blanchard, 32, is now reaching wider audiences. In the gangster drama Sugar Hill he uses the sparse, bluesy sound of a jazz quintet to underline the flavor of tragedy and urban decay that permeates the story. "These characters pull the trigger at the drop of a hat," says Blanchard, "so a massive score would have overwhelmed the starkness I wanted to convey." In The Inkwell, a coming-of-age comedy set in a beach resort in 1976, and Crooklyn, Spike Lee's drama about family life in 1970s Brooklyn, Blanchard sketches dreamy melodies with strings and piano to emphasize the films' nostalgic undercurrents. "The instruments have to have the right timbre," he says, "to hit the mood you want."

Blanchard's movie work began in 1987 when Spike Lee heard one of his albums and asked him to compose the music for School Daze. Blanchard went on to score Lee's next four films and followed those in 1992 with music for Malcolm X, written for a 55-piece orchestra, a big band and a jazz trio--all at different times varying and elaborating a single, stately theme to capture the turbulent flow of Malcolm's life.

Blanchard says his film experience has sharpened his work in jazz composition as well as performance. "Anybody can play a pretty melody," he says, "but in the confines of a movie scene, you only have a few seconds to get to the heart of the matter, to phrase the emotion you want. Jazz helps me take an idea and vary and develop it; film helps me focus my ideas." That kind of thinking can only mean good times for both jazz and movie music. In fact, with Billie riding at No. 6 on the charts, and with all those Blanchard movie scores to listen to, maybe the good times are already here.