It's a simple statement, but so telling for Grammy Award-winning jazz trumpeter and film composer Terence Blanchard.
"New York is kind of like New Orleans," he says. "When you speak of jazz, those are the two places that come to my mind — New Orleans being the birthplace of the music, and New York being the place where you've had a birth of creativity for a number of generations."
When Blanchard and his quintet play at the Birdland jazz club this week, he'll feel right at home.
"New York is where you fi nd a lot of young, very gifted, very creative talent congregating to try to make their way through the world," he says. "I love that about NYC."
Blanchard will be joined by Brice Winston (sax), Joshua Crumbly (bass), Kendrick Scott (drums) and Fabian Almazan (piano).
Best known for his long relationship as director Spike Lee's composer, Blanchard lately has added Broadway to the mix. He wrote the score for "The Motherf— With the Hat," which just ended a three-month run at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.
"It was actually a very good experience, very different from writing for a film, because the music was mostly transitional," he says. "But it was really amazing watching Chris Rock and the other actors develop their characters, from rehearsals, to blocking, to previews, to opening night."
A revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," with actor Blair Underwood as Stanley Kowalski, is Blanchard's next Broadway challenge.
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Blanchard composed the score for the George Lucas production "Red Tails," set for national release in January . "Red Tails" tells the dramatic story of the Tuskegee Airmen, combat pilots who trained at a historically black
college, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The combat unit fought on two fronts: against the Nazis and against discrimination and racism back home.
Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard star in the movie, which is directed by Anthony Hemingway ("The Wire," "Treme").
Blanchard says he composed the score during an intense two-month period.
"This film is extremely important because of who these men were, and the major sacrifices that they and their families made. Not only to fight a war, but to prove to people back home that we were capable of doing anything, capable of being the best at anything," he says.
"The music is definitely heroic. We actually used a 70-piece orchestra with a 40-piece choir.
Then, underneath all of that, I have a lot of African and ethnic percussion grooves that I created here at my home studio.
"I wanted to service the movie in a way that made it grand and big. But at the same time, I didn't want to lose the whole notion of who these guys were and where they came from. So I used the ethnic percussion as a subtle kind of fl avor. I didn't want to go too over the top with it, like blues guitars and such. That kind of thing has been done before."
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