Writing Music for Spike Lee's 'When the Levees Broke' - Terence Blanchard September 3, 2009

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Composing for Spike Lee's 'When the Levees Broke' - Terence Blanchard

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/07/15/Do_You_Know_What_It_Means_to_Miss_New_Orleans

Jazz musician Terence Blanchard remembers the emotional experience of writing music for the Spike Lee film When the Levees Broke. He says, "What you're seeing in New Orleans right now is a testament to the spirit and the will of the community," says Blanchard.

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Trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard, singer Tammy Lynn, and Ira "Dr. Ike" Padnos, founder of the Ponderosa Stomp join jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld to discuss the fight to preserve art and culture in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Top players in the New Orleans music scene discuss the fight to preserve art and culture in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A live performance by the Terence Blanchard Quartet concludes the evening. - Wall Street Journal

Terence Blanchard is a jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, arranger, and Golden Globe-nominated film score composer. Since he emerged on the scene in 1980 with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and then shortly thereafter with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Blanchard has been a leading artist in jazz. He was an integral figure in the 1980s jazz resurgence having recorded several award-winning albums and having performed with the jazz elite. He is known as a straight-ahead artist in the hard bop tradition but has recently utilized an African-fusion style of playing that makes him unique from other trumpeters on the performance circuit. However, it is as a film composer that Blanchard reaches his widest audience. His trumpet can be heard on nearly fifty film scores; more than forty bear his unmistakable compositional style. Since 2000, Blanchard has served as Artistic Director at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. He lives in the Garden District of New Orleans with his wife and four children.