artist info

Terence Blanchard is one of the most significant jazz trumpeters, who started his career during the '80s in Lionel Hampton Orchestra, and continued in Art Blakey Jazz Messenger. After 1990, he founded a formation with Donald Harrison, and started his solo career. Besides giving birth to over 30 records with the participation of the most famous characters of jazz music and several awards and nominations, he is well known for composing music to many films. His 2005 album Flow received two Grammy award nominations and was produced by Herbie Hancock.

In 2005, he won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Album besides McCoy Tyner, Gary Bartz, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash for participating in McCoy's album Illuminations.

From his expansive work composing the scores for Spike Lee films ranging from the documentary 4 Little Girls to the epic Malcolm X, as well as his own discography of recordings such as A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), 2018 USA Fellow and five-time Grammy-winning trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard has been a consistent artistic force for making powerful musical statements concerning painful American tragedies – past and present. With his current quintet E-Collective he addresses the staggering cyclical epidemic of gun violence in this country with his new album Live, 7 powerful songs recorded live in concert that both reflect the bitter frustration of the conscious masses while also providing a balm of emotional healing. With a title that carries a pointed double meaning, the album is an impassioned continuation of the band’s GRAMMY-nominated 2015 studio recording, Breathless.

Discussing the origin of E-Collective, Blanchard states, “I didn’t put this group together to be a protest band. We started out wanting to play music to inspire young people that didn’t want to play jazz to play instrumental music on its highest level. In this computer age, we saw too many kids playing music but not trying to learn theory or master their craft. However, while we were on tour in Europe, Mike Brown got shot. Trayvon Martin had already been murdered. And back then it seemed like these shootings were happening every month. That’s when I felt we had to stand up and make a statement with our 2015 album, Breathless [named in honor of Eric Garner who pleaded in vain to a pile of police officers with their knees in his back that he could not breathe]. After touring that music for two years, we couldn’t just let it go. What would we look like as artists doing a record like Breathless then come out with some other shit totally devoid of consciousness?”

Experimental, electric and exotic, join us for Terence Blanchard and the E-Collective.