Terence Blanchard

Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962) is an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He has also written two operas and more than 80 film and television scores. Blanchard has been nominated for two Academy Awards for Original Score for BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020), both directed by Spike Lee, a frequent collaborator.

Blanchard started his career in 1980 playing in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while studying jazz at Rutgers University. In 1982, just before he turned 20, he dropped out of Rutgers to join The Jazz Messengers, launching a professional career now in its fifth decade. The Metropolitan Opera in New York staged Blanchard's opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones in its 2021–2022 season, the first opera by an African American composer in the organization's history.

Blanchard is also a passionate educational mentor. From 2000 to 2011, Blanchard served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2011, he was named artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami, and in 2015, he became a visiting scholar in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music. In 2019, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), named Blanchard to its Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, where he remained until 2023. In 2023, SFJAZZ announced the appointment of Blanchard as Executive Artistic Director. He leads the organization's artistic programming and guides its overall creative direction.

Blanchard was selected as the 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters.

Blanchard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the only child of Wilhelmina and Joseph Oliver Blanchard. His father was a manager at an insurance company and an amateur opera singer.

Blanchard began playing piano at the age of five, and then at age eight, he switched to the trumpet after hearing Alvin Alcorn perform at his school. Blanchard played trumpet in summer music camps alongside his childhood friends, Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis.

Blanchard attended St. Augustine High School until transferring to John F. Kennedy High School so he could attend the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts where he studied under Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis. From 1980 to 1982, Blanchard studied under jazz saxophonist Paul Jeffrey and trumpeter Bill Fielder at Rutgers University.

While at Rutgers University, Blanchard began touring with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. In 1982, Wynton Marsalis recommended Blanchard as his replacement in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Blakey would appoint Blanchard the band's musical director. Along with his New Orleans homeboy, Donald Harrison, Blanchard toured extensively and recorded five albums with the legendary band.