Terence Blanchard & his E-Collective tune up

by Shaun Brady, FOR THE INQUIRER
Updated: OCTOBER 19, 2016 — 11:51 AM EDT

Terence Blanchard has never been what you’d call predictable. Like Wynton Marsalis before him, the trumpeter left New Orleans in the early '80s, served an apprenticeship with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and seemed destined for leadership in the tradition-focused “Young Lions” movement committed to steering jazz back onto a straight-ahead track. 

But Blanchard veered off that narrow path. He became Spike Lee’s composer of choice, scoring nearly all of the director’s films since 1991’s Jungle Fever. His own music grew more ambitious in scope, from the 2007  album-length suite A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), inspired by the devastation wrought on his hometown by Hurricane Katrina, to the 2013 jazz opera Champion, based on the life of welterweight boxing champion Emile Griffith. 

Last year, he took another unexpected turn with his latest release, Breathless. The album introduced his new band, the E-Collective, an electro-acoustic ensemble inspired as much by hip-hop and modern rock such as Radiohead as by the fusion bands of Blanchard’s youth, including Weather Report and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters. “Influences for this band came from all over the place,” Blanchard said last week, over the phone from Ohio’s Oberlin College, where he was rehearsing for a performance of A Tale of God’s Will.


“The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Rage Against the Machine - when I was growing up, I was listening to Parliament Funkadelic along with Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, and [classical trumpeter] Maurice André. I never wanted to be that guy that says there’s a finite set of criteria that defines who I am. The universe is too big for that.”

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