Blanchard wrote the opera with a libretto by film director Kasi Lemmons, based on a 2014 memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow about his experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The post Terence Blanchard’s opera, ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones,’ comes to the Ordway appeared first on MinnPost.
Five-time Grammy winning trumpet player and composer and two-time Academy Award nominee (For writing original scores for Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and “Da 5 Bloods”) Terence Blanchard is bringing the concert version of his opera, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” to the Ordway on Sunday.
He’ll be performing with his band, the E-Collective, along with the Turtle Island Quartet and vocalists Will Liverman and Adrienne Danrich.
Blanchard wrote the opera with a libretto (the text of the opera) by film director Kasi Lemmons, based on a 2014 memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow about his experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The opera premiered at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. When it came to the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, it was the first opera written by a Black composer ever to be performed at the theater.
I recently interviewed the composer. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sheila Regan: Growing up in New Orleans, would you say music was all around you?
Terence Blanchard: Yeah, I mean, it was all around and even in my household. My father loved opera and was an amateur baritone. My mom’s sister taught piano and voice, and her first husband also sang with my dad. He was also a baritone. My grandfather played guitar, even though I never saw him play – he stopped playing by the time I got around. Still, music was a major thing in our house. We’d go to church performances, recitals and stuff like that. And anytime something of worth came on television, on PBS, my dad would say “Come here, boy, sit down, sit down, sit down. Listen to that.” So I was just surrounded by it all the time. And it was just a natural thing to just want to become a musician.
SR: When you say your father was an amateur opera singer, was he performing in operas?
TB: No, because they weren’t having productions here in the city. He sang in recitals, church recitals. They had a group called the Osceola Five, which was put together by our church organist. Mr. Osceola Blanchet, and those guys will go out caroling every Christmas, and they sang at church every Sunday.
SR: I think it’s so kind of amazing that you met Wynton and Branford Marsalis at summer camp. Do you have any memories that you might share of meeting those two all the time?
TB: Yeah, my aunt, who was a piano teacher, was the one who founded the program and put me in it during the summer. I think I was going into the fifth grade. Wynton was going to sixth and Branford was going to seventh grade. We had a lot of fun with our rehearsals every day, but Wynton didn’t think me and Branford were serious, because we’d always be playing pinball machines in the student lounge during our break. But it was a lot of fun.
SR: And have those friendships remained your entire lives?
TB: Oh for sure. I’m going to have dinner with Branford and his wife tonight for Valentine’s Day. I just played with Wynton and Branford in New York for a tribute to one of our teachers. The friendship and the mutual respect has been there all these years.
SR: You’re versed in more than one musical form – from jazz and improvisation to opera. Is it circumstance when you focus on one or another?
TB: Once I had the commission to do the opera, then the next thing was, well, how do we reduce it to do it as a show, to do concerts? Then people have been booking certain things. You know, some people call me to do stuff with just my quintet and the string quartet, then other people call me to do the stuff with the opera, and we’ve been having fun doing both. And we’re actually working on some new music for a new project. It’s going to be really, really, really amazing. I can’t announce it yet, but it’s gonna be really special.
SR: Do you know Charles M. Blow personally? Or did you just read the book and we’re like, this should be an opera?
TB: I read the book and my wife, who is my manager, read the book as well and told me you should check this out. And I was immediately caught up in it, because I know the whole thing of being different in the neighborhood. I was a young Black kid who wore horn rimmed glasses, carrying a trumpet case, going to the bus stop every weekend while everybody else was out playing football. I was a little different kid in the neighborhood, so I understood what that felt like. I was never molested, but I looked at the level of success that he’s been able to obtain … and thought that this story needs to be told to hopefully inspire a lot of other people. To tell them, no matter your circumstances you can survive and thrive.
SR: Was he very involved in the project?
TB: Initially, yeah because Kasi Lemmons would talk to him a lot about his story. As a matter of fact, just in passing, in a conversation, he said, “I was a boy of peculiar grace,” and that became one of the main phrases that we use in the opera, and he just happened to say it just in passing.
SR: How did you develop the music? Are you playing certain phrases out, is the music in your head and you write it down?
TB: It takes all of those things. Once you learn composition, and you learn all of the tools that are at your disposal, it varies from time-to-time. Sometimes you hear rhythm, sometimes you hear melody, sometimes you hear harmony. And then, in case of opera, I have a libretto, so I start to read it out loud, and start to get the rhythm of the reading under my belt, and then write that down before I start to write any kind of a lot of content that I wanted to feel natural. When writing for my band, it comes from a lot of different sources as well. The main thing, and the most important thing, is to have the tools of composition under your belt. And that’s the thing that I strived for with my students when I was teaching. I always tried to teach them as much about composition as I could, because inspiration comes from a lot of different things.
SR: Had you worked much with Kasi Lemmons before this project?
TB: Yeah, we’ve done a couple of films together. We’ve done “Eve’s Bayou,” “Talk to Me,” “Harriet.”
SR: How was working with her on this project?
TB: Amazing. She’s always wanted to do an opera. She’s a great visionary. She’s a poet. She has beautiful words. She puts the stories together in such a very beautiful context that it was just a joy.
SR: You’ve also done a lot of films with Spike Lee, and I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about how you guys met and how that collaborative relationship has gone over the years?
TB: We met when I was just hired to play on one of his sessions. He heard me playing something on piano and he asked to use it, and asked me to write a string arrangement for it. That was kind of how our relationship started. Then he called me to do “Jungle Fever” and all of the other films, and it’s been a great working relationship. We’ve kind of gotten together over the course of years, looking back at some of the things we’ve done in the past – they were all great projects. It’s been an interesting journey seeing how we’ve grown from those initial projects to where we are now.
SR: Anything in the works for the future?
TB: Not with Spike. There’s a film Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King” director) is working on called “Children of Blood and Bone” she’s just starting to shoot right now. I’m really excited about that.
SR: And so for this performance at the Ordway, which is a concert version of the opera, do you always work with the Turtle Island quartet, or the same singers?
TB: It’s always with Turtle Island. The singers, we have to switch up based on availability.
SR: Anything you might say about the Turtle Island Quartet?
TB: Those guys are redefining what a string quartet is. You have to really go out and check out that music and the stuff that they do. David Balakrishnan is a composer that a lot of people don’t really get yet. I mean, he’s had a great history with the Quartet, but I think he’s a person that should be writing operas and writing bigger works for orchestra, because he has that mind. The only thing he needs is an opportunity.
SR: I know they’re actually coming back to Minneapolis in May for a performance with the Schubert Club. Have you spent much time in the Twin Cities, Terence?
TB: I used to play all the time. I used to play with The Dakota with Art Blakey, myself and other bands I’ve been in.
SR: Can you say how the Ordway performance will go?
TB: We start off the show with some music from our latest album, “Absence”, or maybe some other stuff. We tend to switch it around from time-to-time. And then we do the opera portion and then we close out the show with something else.
SR: Anything you might say about these two singers that we’ll be performing for this show, amazing.
TB: It’s one of the things that I’ve constantly been saying is that when I first did my opera at the Met, this young gentleman – he didn’t mean any harm, but he said, “Do you think your opera is going to inspire young African Americans to sing opera?” I’m like, bro, you haven’t been doing your homework. There’s been a plethora of talented African Americans singing opera for generations, and some of the most talented musicians on the planet that most people don’t know about. They all support each other. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, if one of the friends gets a leading role, at the Chicago Lyric or some other place, they all fly to the opening to support their friends, and I told them, I said, all you have to do is find one singer and ask them, and they’ll give you the line up of everybody else, because that’s how supportive they are of each other.
“Fire Shut Up in My Bones: Excerpts from Terence Blanchard’s historic opera performed with Turtle Island Quartet” performs Sunday, Feb. 23 at 2 p.m. at the Ordway in an Arts Partnership Production, 345 Washington St., St. Paul ($15-110). More information here.