Terence Blanchard: I Am Not Who You Want Me to Be (original) (raw)

I Am Not Who You Want Me to Be

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/special-series/terence-blanchard-black-identity.html

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The Big Ideas: Who Do You Think You Are?

If you think you can define a musician’s identity only by his past work, listen again.

Dancers perform a scene during a rehearsal for Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Terence Blanchard

Mr. Blanchard is a musician and composer.

June 15, 2023

This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: Who do you think you are? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.

“Terence Blanchard? Oh, is he doing jazz now?”

My agent was asked this some years ago at a breakfast meeting over bagels and not-that-great coffee near the New York Hilton Midtown. This was in the first weeks of January, when top international festival programmers visit New York City, while hundreds of performances at Winter Jazzfest and Globalfest take place. Several international music- and theater-booking-related conferences also happen around the same time. During this time, the city teems with possibility, previewing what might appear in venues worldwide over the coming months and years.

“Is he doing jazz now?” was not meant to be uplifting or to invite a discussion of my new projects. It was a criticism of me, my past performances and my approach to composing music, asked by one of the gatekeepers of European festivals.

Despite being in town to check out the soon-to-be-known unknowns and negotiate with their agents when the fees are still low, Mr. Festival Programmer was dressing down this conveniently offstage Terence Blanchard guy by implying — to my agent no less — that I would neverplay the kind of jazz he could book for his festivals.

My latest release at the time was my 2015 album “Breathless,” and it was meant to be different and provocative. I wanted to expand the dialogue about race and race relations while simultaneously expanding my composing and performance. Approach it with the bulky history of music weighing down your expectations, and you probably won’t see it as worthy, either, just as Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way” and “Bitches Brew” confounded critics who didn’t hear what they expected. They concluded that what Davis was playing wasn’t jazz, because it didn’t sound like his previous work. A track on “Breathless,” “See Me As I Am,” grew out of this sentiment. Don’t come to me or my work with preconceived notions.

The reality is I have played with some of the greats, including Art Blakey, the leader of the Jazz Messengers and one of the most influential drummers of our time. I often share the stage with Herbie Hancock, who continues to redefine what jazz can be. Since 2015, I’ve also played hundreds of concerts around the world with my electric band, the E-Collective. I’ve written a few dozen film scores, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards. The E-Collective has released three albums, the latest being “Absence,” a love letter to the saxophonist and singular composer Wayne Shorter created with the Turtle Island Quartet, a string quartet. For good measure, I composed two operas, a few classical pieces and musical works for dance**.**

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