UHD Celebrates 50 Years with One of the All-Time Jazz Greats
The University of Houston-Downtown is celebrating its 50th anniversary in a BIG way—with
a concert by jazz great Terence
Blanchard, the eight-time Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, pianist, and composer with
more than 80 film and TV credits, including scores for every Spike Lee Joint since
1991.
Blanchard returns to Houston for one night only, Saturday, Nov. 9, 2024, with "TERENCE BLANCHARD LIVE FOR UHD: Film Scores, Jazz and Beyond" at the University of Houston (UH) Cullen Performance Hall, 4300 University Drive. Joining him on stage will be his own band plus musicians from the UH Moore's School of Music.
Early Bird tickets range from $43 to $213 until Sept. 15; regularly priced tickets will be $50 to $250, and students and members of the military will receive a 10% discount. VIP seating includes the Fireside Chat with Terence Blanchard on Friday, Nov. 8, 2024, and a meet and greet opportunity with the artist the evening of the concert.
Boundary-breaking and genre-defying, Blanchard is recognized globally as a dazzling soloist and a prolific composer for film, television, opera, Broadway, orchestras and for his own ensembles. In fact, leading theater magazine TheaterMania recently cited Blanchard as "the most exciting American composer working in opera today." Most recently, he was named an official 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master as well as a member of the 2024 class of awardees for the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Letters.
One of the world's most recognizable composers for film, Blanchard became only the second African American artist to be nominated twice in the original score category at the Academy Awards, duplicating Quincy Jones' feat from 1967's "In Cold Blood" and 1985's "The Color Purple." He has composed the scores for more than 20 Spike Lee projects over three decades - ranging from the documentary "When the Levees Broke" to the recent Lee films "BlacKkKlansman" and "Da 5 Bloods" (both of which garnered Blanchard Oscar nominations).
Blanchard has also interwoven beautiful melodies that create strong backdrops to human stories like Regina King's "One Night in Miami"; Kasi Lemmons' "Eve's Bayou"; George Lucas' "Red Tails"; the HBO drama series "Perry Mason" (now in its second season); Apple TV's docuseries "They Call Me Magic" (for which Blanchard received an Emmy nomination) and Gina Prince Bythewood and Viola Davis's critically acclaimed film "The Woman King."
In addition to Blanchard's film scoring, he is also a groundbreaking opera composer. The Metropolitan Opera staged a remount of Blanchard's "Fire Shut Up in My Bones" on Sept. 27, 2021, which broke box office records at the Met, also making it the first opera by an African American composer to premiere at the Met in its 138-year history. "Fire" has been widely recognized as one of our nation's most important cultural milestones and returned to the Met for a second run in April of 2024. Both this opera and Blanchard's first opera, "Champion," which was staged at the Met in April 2023, received Grammy Awards for "Best Opera Recording."
In 1994, Blanchard told DownBeat: "Writing for film is fun, but nothing can beat being a jazz musician, playing a club, playing a concert." In his expansive career as a recording leader, Blanchard delivered "Absence," a collaboration with his longtime E-Collective band and the acclaimed Turtle Island Quartet, which received Grammy nominations in November 2021 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo for Blanchard. Recorded in February 2020 just before the COVID-19 lockdowns, "Absence" started out as a project to show gratitude to Wayne Shorter. "I knew that Wayne wasn't feeling well at the time, so I wanted to honor him to let him know how much he has meant to me," said Blanchard. "When you look at my own writing, you can see how much I've learned from Wayne. He mastered writing compositions starting with a simple melody and then juxtaposing it against the harmonies that come from a different place to make it come alive in a different light." Blanchard has earned eight Grammy Awards alongside nine other nominations.
Born in New Orleans in 1962, Blanchard is a musical polymath who launched his solo career as a bandleader in the 1990s. Since then, he has released 20 solo albums, garnered 15 Grammy nominations, composed for the stage and for more than 60 films, and received 10 major commissions.
Today Blanchard lives in Los Angeles as well as in his native New Orleans and serves as the Executive Artistic Director for SF Jazz, the largest nonprofit jazz presenter in the world.
Photo Credit: Cedric Angeles