Jazz great Terence Blanchard will bring his many talents back to the Bayou City for a night of celebration.
Blanchard will return for one night only on Saturday as the University of Houston - Downtown rings in its 50th anniversary with the concert "Terence Blanchard Live for UHD: Film Scores, Jazz and Beyond."
Blanchard, an eight-time Grammy Award winner and two-time Oscar nominee who has composed scores for nearly two dozen Spike Lee projects, "The Woman King," and more, will be accompanied by his own band, The E-Collective, but they aren't the only ones who will be backing him.
Student musicians from the UH Moores School of Music will also be on stage.
"Education has always been extremely important to me, and one of the things about it is that you have to put students in real-world situations, you know, to have them understand what it's like to play on a professional level," said Blanchard, who retired from being in education just last year.
It'll mark a major milestone for the students with someone who's familiar with making history of his own.
As a groundbreaking composer, Blanchard's 2021 "Fire Shut Up in My Bones" broke box office records at the Metropolitan Opera. That made it the first opera by an African American composer to premiere at the Met in its 138-year history.
"Fire" is based on the memoir of New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow and tells the story of his journey healing from unspeakable childhood trauma.
"Fire" and Blanchard's first opera, "Champion," received Grammy Awards for "Best Opera Recording."
"It was an awesome experience, an amazing experience, a totally unexpected experience, you know? I never thought I'd write an opera. Really? Me? No," he told ABC13. "My father loved opera. I heard a lot of opera growing up. To see the most talented musicians on the planet walking around a stage singing something that you had written. It's something that I can't describe."
It also became a deeply personal opportunity for his performers.
"When I talked to some of the singers, they kept telling me a lot of them grew up in the church, singing in the church or singing jazz or singing R&B. And when it came time to sing opera, they were always told to turn that off. To sing Puccini... OK, I get it because that was Puccini. That was well before any of our music was really created or developed. Well, the thing that we surmise is that this is a current story coming from our culture. So we want you to bring all of that back and utilize all of that to express yourself," Blanchard said.
Blanchard's body of work runs the gamut of creating melodies that tie stories together as seen in "One Night in Miami," "Red Tails," and more.
He's also behind the score for the National Geographic series "Genius: MLK/X."
His skills have even taken him to a Disney adventure, one featuring a princess named Tiana.
You'll be treated to his musical touch when you visit Magic Kingdom at Disney World for Tiana's Bayou Adventure, the ride based on the 2009 New Orleans - set feature "The Princess and the Frog."
"I had so much fun working on that thing," Blanchard told ABC13 with a smile. "I'm just there producing music. They wanted to create a radio show for the queue line, so they wanted to keep people entertained. We created about 90 minutes worth (of music). A whole dialogue with the radio announcer and everything, It was a ton of fun."
There's plenty more fun to be had when Blanchard performs Saturday night in the University of Houston Cullen Performance Hall at 7 p.m. Tickets are still available.
Hear more from his interview with ABC13 in the video player above.
Disney is the parent company of ABC13.
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