Terence Blanchard is jazz royalty—trumpet player, bandleader, film score composer, and recording artist, all rolled into one. Terence is an alumnus of the Berklee College of Music, the premier institute of the performing arts, along with such notables as Quincy Jones, Diana Krall, as well as any number of other Grammy-winning engineers, producers, and instrumentalists across various musical genres. His close ties to Berklee revolve around teaching and mentoring rather than merely as an alumnus … that and similar educational involvements, in addition to his film scoring, may be the reason Blanchard hasn’t exactly become a household name.

In the early ‘90s Terence gained attention as a soloist, performing on Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues. He went on to score all of Lee’s subsequent films, including the Hurricane Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke. Levees was originally part of the musical score, evocatively performed by Terence in the following video along with a forty piece orchestra!

The song I Cover the Waterfront was written by Johnny Green and Edward Heyman in 1933; it was inspired by Max Miller’s 1932 novel of the same name and a subsequent 1933 film. The Terence Blanchard rendition from his 1994 album, The Billie Holiday Songbook, features Terence on trumpet, Bruce Barth at the piano, Troy Davis playing drums, and Chris Thomas on bass.

Sing Soweto is a New Orleans jazz and bop track released in 1991 on the album titled Terence Blanchard. The Soweto Uprising (or Rebellion) was a 1976 protest in South Africa, where thousands of Black students were killed in a march against the requirement they be instructed only in the Afrikaans language, which they strongly associated with the apartheid government. Blanchard’s trumpet and subtle chorus on the video (below) capture the pain of the struggle.