Today’s date in 1962 marks the birthday in New Orleans of Terence Blanchard, the American jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator. “I come from a family of musicians,” says Blanchard. “My father was an opera singer, my mother played piano and taught voice, my grandfather played the guitar. What I wanted was to be a jazz musician, have a band, travel and create music.”

Well, he got his wish!

Blanchard started piano at age 5 and trumpet at 8, playing music with childhood

friends Wynton and Branford Marsalis at summer music camps and studied composition with their father, Ellis Marsalis. In 1980, while still in his teens, Blanchard began performing with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and later Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

In the 1990s Blanchard started writing film and TV scores and has composed more than forty of them to date. In 2019 was nominated for an Academy Award for his music for Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.”

In addition to holding major teaching positions and touring with his quintet, the E- Collective, the amazingly energetic and productive Terence Blanchard is also working on an opera titled Fire Shut up In My Bones that is scheduled to be premiered at the Metropolitan Opera.