★★★★★
Magnetic is Terence Blanchard's return to the Blue Note label after an absence of six years. Its release coincides with the June 2013 premiere in St. Louis of Blanchard's first opera, Champion. Magnetic is a small-group recording of uncommon richness, complexity and scope. It sounds like the work of a jazz musician who writes operas. Blanchard also writes film scores, and is accustomed to having orchestras and voices at his disposal...
- jazztimes.com
2013-06-18
★★★★★
Terence Blanchard is a man with a working quintet that comes out of the "straight-ahead" hard bop of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers but isn't afraid to incorporate electronics, daring harmonics, or grooving permutations of tempo-shirting and complex structure. He is also a man who writes film scores and composes, who ventures beyond. In other words, he's a model modern jazz player--not pigeonholed as "traditional" or "avant-garde" or "fusion" or any other one thing...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-06-14
★★★★★
Jazz history isn't exactly littered with great albums featuring string orchestras. There have been a few?tenor saxophonist Stan Getz's Focus (Verve, 1961) and British reed player Tim Garland's If The Sea Replied (Sirocco, 2005) are both masterpieces, but precious few others were recorded in the 44 years which separate them. All too often, string orchestras seem either to cramp an improvising musician's style or deliver a truck load of sound and fury signifying very little, or both...
- www.allaboutjazz.com
2012-09-24
★★★★★
Although he's spent much of the past 15 years scoring films for Spike Lee and others, trumpeter Terence Blanchard certainly hasn't forgotten about jazz, as his impressive Blue Note debut makes clear. Bounce finds the former Jazz Messenger having grown well past his early days as part of the "young lions" phenomenon of the '80s into a mature, individual artist exploring a wide palette of jazz colors...
- www.allaboutjazz.com
2012-05-21
★★★★★
The last we heard from Terence Blanchard on record was the vibrant Flow, which he showcased at the 2005 Essence Festival as the marquee New Orleans act on the bill. That recording's soothing grooves were inspired by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: the Psychology of Optimum Experience. Little did Blanchard know that by the end of the summer, the experience he was destined to live through was watching his hometown swallowed up by Lake Ponchartrain, a deluge that nearly killed his mother...
- www.offbeat.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
Attendees of Terence Blanchard's Jazz Fest set got a preview of this outstanding effort by the trumpeter and his solid band. Memorable from the performance and on the disc is the passionate ballad, "Over There." Twenty-something, Aaron Parks introduces this beauty alone at the piano with Blanchard delicately picking up the melody. Its gentleness soothes like a lullaby until, as if overcome by adoration, the trumpeter screams with emotion and the Kendrick Scott's drums explode...
- www.offbeat.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
"I'm not against smartness and brains; it's just that it falls so radically short of what it means to be human and making the right mature choices in life." —Dr. Cornel West This is one of the quotes from Dr. West that run through the album version of Choices and are triggered in live performance by a foot pedal in trumpeter Terence Blanchard's stage setup. The outstanding young musicians who join Blanchard on this project help him demonstrate that choices are the fulcrum of our existence...
- www.offbeat.com
2010-11-02
★★★★★
One of this year's most anticipated releases is the new recording by New Orleans-born trumpeter Terence Blanchard. This is his first recording (with the exception of his work on the Mo' Better Blues soundtrack) since the breakup of the celebrated group he co-led with alto saxophonist Donald Harrison. The result was well worth the wait. Along with bassist Rodney Whitaker and pianist Bruce Barth, Blanchard has invited Branford Marsalis and Jeff Watts in on tenor saxophone and drums respectively...
- www.offbeat.com
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Conceived as a concept-album tribute to jazz music and jazz-inspired/influenced music used in post-1950 movies, Jazz In Film succeeds on a few different levels. First & foremost, it's great jazz: confidant, rich, inspired solos from some of the best post-bop players America has (especially Joe Henderson). The orchestral arrangements actually enhance the music, not just render it more (gasp! horrors!) accessible...
- www.jazzreview.com
2010-08-23
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