Jazz Composer, Terence Blanchard, talks elevating Black Culture via opera, Super Bowl 2025, and African Americans’ impact on society – IPM Newsroom

In films, such as Spike Lee’s Malcolm X or Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, music is used as an underlying tool to draw emotions from viewers.
Tones of sound allow audiences to feel what Lee’s characters are experiencing on the big screen, whether it’s joy, tension or sorrow.
The man working behind the scenes on those productions is jazz composer Terence Blanchard.
A Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated musician, Blanchard has brought Black American culture into another form of media: opera.
He and his band E-Collective partnered with the Turtle Island String Quartet during their stop at the University of Illinois Krannert Center for Performing Arts on Feb. 27.
They performed pieces from Blanchard’s opera, “Fire Shut Up In My Bones.”
The cast also included musician Andrew F. Scott, with guest singers Norman Garrett and Adrienne Danrich.
(Photo credit: David Pierce)
The production is a musical interpretation of a memoir written by Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, which tells his story of overcoming poverty, sexual trauma, and isolation.
Blanchard, a New Orleans Native, told Illinois Soul’s David Pierce many Black Americans can relate to Blow’s experience.
“Growing up in my neighborhood, I wasn’t sexually abused the way he was, but I know what isolation feels like,” he said. “Because I was the guy wearing glasses, carrying a horn case, walking to the bus stop every weekend to go for my lessons, which wasn’t the most popular thing to do in my neighborhood at the time.
Baritone, Ryan Speedo Green, in Fire Shut in Up in My Bones at the Met Opera (Credit: Marty Sohl/Met Opera)
“I was always seeming to be a little different from other kids, because I was shy, I was quiet. So kids just being kids, you know, they create these pockets of groups, and I think they create those groups just for safety and security, right? But in creating those groups, there’s isolation that happens for other kids.”
“Fire Shut Up In My Bones” intertwines jazz, R&B, and gospel into one performance. It was a season opener at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2021, drawing thousands of people through its eight showings.
“It was a blessing, and to do it, because it’s more about trying to just put our culture on the stage and let people get a glimpse of what it is that we experienced growing up,” Blanchard said.
But the opera was also the first written by an African American composer to be offered at the Metropolitan in its nearly 140-year existence.
“It broke a lot of barriers, you know, because what upset me about that moniker is that I always have to tell people, ‘I was the first, but I wasn’t the first qualified,’ Blanchard said. “There were composers that were very qualified well before me.”
“William Grant Still is one of the ones that I cite. I actually saw a ledger of rejected projects, and his name was in there three times, you know. And some of the comments that was made about his music was incredible, given the fact that I just saw one of the performances of his opera in St Louis, and thought it was amazing. Didn’t know it was his opera. And I’m saying, you know, ‘man, what is this? This is beautiful.’ This is and it was an opera written, it’s called “Highway One”, written in the ‘30s. That’s how forward thinking this guy was.”

Photo of William Grant Still (Credit: PBS)
Blanchard recently performed during the pregame concert of the 2025 Super Bowl. While he said he had a good time, he was taken aback seeing the size of the football goal post with his own eyes.
”I’m in the middle of the field during rehearsal, and I looked to my left. And I go, ‘man, look like they put the small goal post up there,’” he said.
Rapper Kendrick Lamar lit up the internet with his half-time show, which showed Black Americans being relentless in the face of criticism against the genre of hip-hop and Black culture at-large.
The presentation included Lamar performing his 2024 smash hit, “Not Like Us” and actor, Samuel L. Jackson, playing the role of a reimagined version of the American caricature Uncle Sam.
The satirical figure passed judgment on Lamar, critiquing aspects of his performance as inappropriate or indecent.
When Blanchard saw the show, he thought about how Americans would interpret it.
“It was an amazing thing, because, you know, our president was there at the game. And I kept wondering, is this resonating with anybody?” he said.
Blanchard also gave commentary on more topics including where the nation is headed with African American history.
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