UM's Terence Blanchard To Compose For The Great White Way

Artistic Director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music, Terence Blanchard will compose music for the upcoming Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' classic A Streetcar Named Desire. Directed by Emily Mann and starring Blair Underwood, the show is scheduled to open in the spring of 2012. The play was last seen on Broadway in 2005.

Earlier this year, the five time Grammy Award winning jazz trumpeter and film composer was named Artistic Director of the Henry Mancini Institute (HMI), a prestigious program at the University of Miami Frost School of Music that is training a new generation of orchestral and jazz artists to create and perform in mixed-genre, collaborative settings.

Blanchard recently completed work on his critically acclaimed score for the Broadway play, The Mother****** With the Hat, which just closed this summer in New York and starred Chris Rock.

Blanchard has established himself as one of the most influential jazz musicians and film score masters of his generation, a member of a jazz legacy that has shaped the contours of modern jazz today. With more than 29 albums to his credit, as a musician Blanchard is a multi-Grammy Award winner and nominee, winning last year for "Best Jazz Instrumental Solo" for his performance on Jeff "Tain" Watts' project, "Watts." In 2009, Blanchard won for his instrumental solo for "Be-Bop" on Live At The 2007 Monterey Jazz Festival. In addition to receiving the award, Blanchard performed live on the telecast along with other New Orleans artists including Lil' Wayne, Allen Toussaint and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who were all joined on-stage by singer Robin Thicke. In 2008, Blanchard also won a Grammy for his CD, A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina), a beautifully haunting and impassioned song cycle about Hurricane Katrina and the ravages incurred upon the City of New Orleans and its residents.

As a film composer, Blanchard has more than 50 scores to his credit and received a Golden Globe nomination for Spike Lee's 25th Hour. In 2009, Blanchard loaned his musical voIce To Louis the Alligator in The Princess and the Frog. He completed the score for Lee's Miracle at St. Anna, as well as the soundtrack for DarNell Martin's Cadillac Records. He has scored two Broadway plays, The Mother****** with the Hat, produced by Scott Rudin ("The Social Network" and "True Grit") and A Streetcar Named Desire. He is also composing the score for George Lucas film about the Tuskegee Airmen entitled, Red Tails; and a commission for Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Other film music written by Blanchard includes Kasi Lemmons' Eve's Bayou and Talk to Me, Oprah Winfrey's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tim Story's Barbershop and Ron Shelton's Dark Blue and music for over one dozen Spike Lee films or documentaries.

About the Frost School of Music
The Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music is a world-class music institution with 100 faculty members and 700 students located on the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami. The mission of the Frost School of Music is to foster musical leadership by providing an innovative, relevant, and inspiring education; advance performance, creativity and scholarship; and enrich the world community with meaningful outreach and brilliant cultural offerings. The Frost School is the exclusive home of the Henry Mancini Institute which provides students with cross-genre performance opportunities in real-world professional settings, and the Bruce Hornsby Creative American Music Program which develops the creative skills of talented young artist/songwriters by immersing them in the diverse traditions of American songwriting. For more information, visit http://www.music.miami.edu.