Ter­ence Blan­chard on com­pos­ing the sound­track to Spike Lee’s career

A close col­lab­o­ra­tor with Spike Lee since the ear­ly 1990s, the sounds of com­pos­er and jazz musi­cian Ter­ence Blan­chard are as much a hall­mark of the director’s films as any dol­ly shot or colour­ful dia­tribe. From Harlem choirs to piano melodies to pret­ty much any­thing you can think of, his ver­sa­til­i­ty is sec­ond to none. In light of Blan­chard receiv­ing his sec­ond con­sec­u­tive Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion for his work on Da 5 Bloods, we caught up to dis­cuss his cre­ative process and a unique work­ing relationship.

LWLies: How did you and Spike first meet?

Blan­chard: I was just hired as the ses­sion play­er. There was this guy, Harold Vick, who’s a jazz musi­cian and worked with Spike’s father [Bill]. They want­ed to put togeth­er a big band of young and old musi­cians back then, and Spike remem­bered me because I walked in with a Lak­ers hat, t‑shirt, and I had the shoes. It was right after they beat Boston, one of those series. And he goes, ​‘Lak­ers fan?’ And I was like, ​‘Yeah, bro.’ Then a few months after that, he’s got me sit­ting court­side yelling. All of a sud­den, I’m a Knicks fan.

What sparked the move to you being a composer?

We were doing pre-record­ed music for Mo’ Bet­ter Blues, and I sat at the piano, I was play­ing some­thing from my album that I was going to record, and he heard it and he dug it. And he said, ​‘Can I record it with just the trum­pet?’ I said, ​‘Sure!’ After­wards, he asked me if I could write a string arrange­ment for it, and I did it. Right after that he said, ​‘You have a future in this busi­ness,’ and he called me to do Jun­gle Fever. I wasn’t sit­ting down look­ing to be a film com­pos­er, but I always want­ed to write. I actu­al­ly called my com­po­si­tion teacher. I said, ​‘I got this gig, I don’t know what to do.’ He told me: ​‘Trust your train­ing.’ And that’s what I did.

How has your part­ner­ship evolved over the years?

Spike real­ly admires tal­ent, and peo­ple who work at their craft. He doesn’t come in like a bull in a chi­na shop say­ing, ​‘It’s got to be like this.’ That’s not Spike. He’s going to give you room to do your thing. I’ve heard it from all of the actors, I’ve heard it from post-pro­duc­tion peo­ple, and I’ve expe­ri­enced it myself. The way our rela­tion­ship has evolved is that we’ve got­ten to the point that we don’t even have a short­hand; it’s like a no-hand. I know what he likes. He gives me the projects, and I’ll send him themes and he goes through them, and once he starts to iso­late the ones that he likes then you just move from there. And it’s been like that for about 30 years now. It’s a great work­ing relationship.

In the case of Da 5 Bloods, how did you land on what you want­ed from the sound of the film?

Just by watch­ing the film. That’s one of the things about Spike: it’s all on the screen. That first bat­tle scene when they’re in the heli­copter – that set the tone for me in terms of the score because that was the first piece I had to write. When I look at that scene, I was like, ​‘Spike doesn’t want action music’. He wants very melod­ic, almost oper­at­ic music. But that scene is a lit­tle over four min­utes, and that’s a long time to keep that music ener­gised. So it took me a few days to real­ly fig­ure it out.

When you have great per­form­ers – Del­roy Lin­do, Clarke Peters, Isa­iah [Whit­lock], Chad­wick [Bose­man] – you just have to fol­low them. They’ll tell you, and Spike’s vision will tell you what the film needs. You just have to be open to it. It’s like, it would unveil more of itself the more I threw at it, if that makes sense. I love work­ing like that.

Spike often reuses old pieces of yours: BlacK­kKlans­man has a cue from Inside Man. Did you ever plan for how the new pieces of music would inter­act with the old­er ones?

Not at all. That’s Spike. If he loves some­thing, he loves it. I remem­ber when we did that one from Inside Man that was used in BlacK­kKlans­man, when we did it in the stu­dio, every now and then he would just ask the engi­neer to pull it up so he could lis­ten to it. So I knew that he loved that piece.

I asked Spike about that too. He start­ed quizzing me on where else he used that music cue. If I recall cor­rect­ly it was When the Lev­ees Broke.

Yeah, I think on the sec­ond set of doc­u­men­taries. I think he used it on the first one too. In the case of When the Lev­ees Broke, that was a means of resources. Spike was stretch­ing every pen­ny to make it a four-hour doc­u­men­tary, and HBO want­ed two hours, but there was no way for him to whit­tle it down.

I thought every­one gave 150 per cent on Mal­colm X, but man, when we got to When the Lev­ees Broke, and the bud­get was shrink­ing, every­body just stayed on. We were like, ​‘We need to do this, and let these peo­ple share their expe­ri­ences with the world.’ It was a beau­ti­ful thing to expe­ri­ence. I remem­ber when we were scor­ing it, there were new videos com­ing in on the news, and they were incor­po­rat­ing that into the doc­u­men­tary after we were scor­ing. Nor­mal­ly, when you get to the scor­ing stage, every­thing is already locked.

I’m always struck by the ver­sa­til­i­ty of your work. How do you incor­po­rate so many dif­fer­ent gen­res and ele­ments into your work?

Com­po­si­tion teach­es you to take an idea and man­gle it a mil­lion dif­fer­ent ways to expand what the ini­tial idea is. The sim­plest exam­ple of that I can give you [sings Beethoven’s ​‘Sym­pho­ny No. 5’], just those four notes. That’s a very sim­plis­tic exam­ple of the ini­tial idea, right? The thing about com­po­si­tion is mod­i­fy­ing the idea – not what your ego wants.

When I was doing my opera, you should see the scratch pieces of paper that nev­er make it, but it’s where I take the ini­tial idea and run through all these per­mu­ta­tions to find oth­er ideas. That’s where you can find oth­er melodies, tran­si­tion­al phras­es, and it stays with­in the con­text of the ini­tial idea. But you have to be open to doing the work to find those things.

I asked Wayne Short­er, who’s a great jazz musi­cian and my men­tor, about com­po­si­tion years ago and he said: ​‘You got­ta go down into the base­ment and vis­it every note.’ You just can’t take any­thing that you come up with the first time and think that’s it. It’s a seed, and you have to nur­ture it and allow it to grow. That’s where the real work of a com­pos­er comes in.