The opening three and a half minutes of Jungle Fever (1991) provide a glimpse into the kinetic and plastic possibilities of form that would come to define Spike Lee’s filmmaking over the next (still in-progress, blessedly) 33 years.
The sequence begins in memorial, lingering on a still image of Yusuf Hawkins, the 16-year-old Black boy killed by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The image fades to black, briefly, before the viewer is buffeted by a gummy, synthy Stevie Wonder line of melody. The abrupt transition suggests that to be clear-eyed about the cruel violence of a racist world is not to abandon pleasure, but rather to commingle the two seemingly opposite feelings, to shoot images in the tension. The opening credits ride Wonder’s vocal hips and funk punches while images of Lee’s beloved New York City streets roll by, slow and stylized, as if shot from a honey-coated lens.
Having shot Do the Right Thing (1989) not three years before, Jungle Fever sees the filmmaker and his collaborators expand their scope from a single, heat-fevered city block to the city itself, a breathing, sometimes addled, sometimes stricken thing, always capable of pockets of love. Fittingly, the names of Lee’s collaborators appear located on street signs, many of them familiar in an already troupe-like ensemble: cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson, costume designer Ruth E. Carter, production designer Wynn Thomas, editor Sam Pollard, actors Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson. And then: “Original Music Score,” with the name “Terence Blanchard.”
Of the more than 80 film and television scores Blanchard has composed in the interim 33 years, his work for Jungle Fever—the first full film score of his (again, blessedly still in-progress) career—is its own skeleton key for an artist of restless melodic innovation and excavation. Matching the “more life” melodrama that Lee and Dickerson attach to the images, Blanchard’s lush score both gestures back to the melody-forward scores of Hollywood’s past and innovates a novel fusion that could perhaps only emerge from a composer maintaining a full career as a jazz trumpeter. The strings sweep, but always to cradle melodic themes, each attaching themselves to characters and locations. On your fifth or twelfth viewing of Jungle Fever, you realize that the score is playing in a kind of quartet, letting the mise en scène push forward, nudging an actor to solo this or that way, demurring to the edit. This sense of creative variation is evident in any number of Blanchard’s scores, albums, live recordings, or operas.
In late May (before the completion of the NBA Finals…), over video chat, I spoke with Blanchard, who was generous and gracious in time and thought even while working on a new TV project, preparing live dates with the E Collective on both American coasts, and engaging in his regular work as Executive Artistic Director at SFJAZZ. During our conversation, it became clear that it’s exactly this scope of interests—in film, jazz, pedagogy, sports, and the work of art in society—that engines his compositions. As an imperfect supplement to our conversation, I offer a playlist to coincide with some of the moments Blanchard speaks on in our wide-ranging conversation. That we didn’t manage to touch on some of the seminal films that Blanchard and Lee have worked on—among them, Crooklyn (1994), Clockers (1995), 4 Little Girls (1997), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), and Chi-Raq (2015)—is a testament to the breadth of their collaboration.
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What’s the boundary between your teaching, scoring, and performing work these days?
I don’t really think about it as being separate too much anymore. It’s all music, you know? This show that I’m working on now—I have a bunch of groove-based stuff in it. So I’m finding music, working with some of the guys in my band and some players that I’ve always wanted to play with. It’s just about getting in the studio and having fun, man, creating. That’s the most important thing, I think, for me, is having fun doing it. If it’s not engaging, then why do it? I could do other things to pay the bills.
On that sense of joy: do you remember the first time you were sitting in a movie theater and you heard music that thrilled you, that really made an impact?
When it comes to film stuff, man, I remember: it was Star Wars (1977). I was in Chicago. I think I was playing with Art Blakely. And I went to this theater on my day off, you know, I was just walking by, I said, I’m just gonna watch a movie. Go in, and man, just the sound of that orchestra and the brass, the fanfares that the brass were playing, it really caught my attention, you know? And then the other film that I saw that caught my attention in a different way was Chinatown (1974). That melody was such a haunting, beautiful jazz-like melody. That caught me too. And I’m like, Well, wait a minute, that’s jazz in a film. But even at that point, I still didn’t think about being a film composer. I was just intrigued by what it was that I was experiencing.
There was that album you did in 1999, right? You played the Chinatown theme on it. Am I remembering right?
Yeah, yeah. Jazz in Film.
Does jazz feel close to film? Does it feel far away from it?
Oh, it doesn’t feel far away from it. I mean, it’s just a different expression. I think we tend to look at film as being this isolated kind of thing. As if there’s something like “film music.” No, not really. There’s all different types of music that can help tell a story. It’s all in how it’s used. The other day, a student asked me a question: how do you maintain your identity? And I’m like, well, you don’t think about it. In those terms—what you think about is like, what does humor sound like to you? What does anger, pain, sorrow, happiness, joy…what do all of those things sound like to you musically? And when it comes time to work on these projects, you use those tools that you’ve identified in your soul to help tell a story. Now, that doesn’t always match up with a director, obviously, but that’s where collaboration comes into play. Because even though I can start in that realm, a lot of times other directors can help expand my palette by saying, Hey man, but what about this? And even when they make those suggestions, I’m still doing it from my point of view. I’m not changing who I am. And then those things just help expand my vocabulary.
Has it ever happened where you share something that you’re working on with the director and you realize that they interpret it—and its feeling—differently?
That happened to me once. Yeah, I didn’t…I didn’t stay on that project. That was a long time ago, man. And even though I wasn’t on that project, I heard about its problems. You know what I mean? I think it’s when you have those types of issues, that goes beyond what collaboration can do. That’s something else. Because look, who listens to a major chord and gets sad? Some of that stuff is just physics, man. Those chords resonate in harmony, they elicit that kind of feeling from us. Whereas when you put something that’s like, really dense, you know, it can create another type of emotion, because of that vibration that it carries, you know?
Right. That’s so interesting to hear you say that it’s physics. Because there is a sort of scientific element to the way music is just washing over bodies sometimes.
Listen, when I work with George Lucas…George Lucas is a brilliant mind. He’s a great filmmaker, great storyteller. But he’s also a guy who’s into neuroscience. If you listen to him, man, it’s like sometimes he makes you feel like we don’t have free will. I’m a person who thinks there’s a happy balance between the two. But I do think there is something to the neuroscience, about how we respond, happiness and joy, all of those things, you know? But within that framework, as an artist, there’s my interpretation of that feeling versus what somebody else may come up with. That something might be just as pleasing—will sound totally different—than what it is that I do. And that’s fine. That’s what art is supposed to be about. That’s the reason why we tell these stories, because we’re coming at it from different viewpoints.
How often is it a matter of getting the right instrumentation to get at the feeling? The right combination of colors and textures?
That’s a big part of it, but it’s not just instrumentation—it’s also players. You have to think of it like a sporting event. You know what I mean? There’s so many quarterbacks in the NFL, but Patrick Mahomes and [Travis] Kelce have a relationship that works together, that really makes it work. And now you split those guys up and have them play with other people, they may be effective, but they’ll probably look different. It’s the same thing in the music world. You can write a cello solo for an orchestra piece, and then one cellist is going to sound different than the next. That’s all part of it too.
When you carry it further, into bringing in jazz musicians, you know, certain jazz musicians are gonna have a different sound. For example, man, when I did The Woman King (2022), right? I knew that Dianne Reeves was going to be the perfect person for that. She’s a friend of mine, I’ve known her for a long time. I know her voice, I know what it is she loves, I know what it is she likes to sing, how she interprets things. And I thought, man, she has to be on this. As soon as she started to sing, everybody in the room was like, Okay, great. Now, if we would have brought in another singer, it could be great, it could be nice, but it wouldn’t have been that. You know what I mean? That’s the thing. So it’s not just instrumentation, it’s also casting.
And that seems, if not exactly the opposite, maybe at odds with that more scientific approach, the neuroscience and physics angle, right? There’s also this notion of ‘feel.’
Yes, yes, exactly. We can all relate to happiness, but some people cry, some people laugh, you know what I mean? Because you have different responses to the same type of stimulus.
Reactions to music feels so personal because it’s so related to memory. What it evokes is necessarily different for everyone.
Oh, man, listen, it’s funny that you say that. When I was a kid, I got sick, you know, and I was eating celery. It’s gonna sound silly, but to this day, if you put celery in front of me, it’s like I have a Pavlovian dog response, you know? It’s like, please move that away from me! And it’s deep because, you know, my wife is a great cook, and sometimes she likes to put celery in stuff. Please, please, please, no. And I go right back to being like, eight years old, man. It’s ridiculous.
It’s moments like that where you realize how happily limited these bodies are? We’re just doing what we can, constantly being pulled off in different directions, transported through our senses.
My daughter, my middle daughter, man, I call her touchy-feely because she can’t come into a room without touching something. And I know that that stimuli creates a certain type of reaction for her. So I mean, we all have these different reactions, you know? And there also is something to the whole neuroscience thing, or else we wouldn’t have these common reactions to these stories. Why would we say, Oh man, that was so beautiful, and everybody in the room would agree? Or hear a terrible story and go, Man, that was so horrible. And then we look at the person who doesn’t find the horror in that story as being abnormal.
BlacKkKlansman (2018) really engages with that collective memory, that collective feeling, in its relationship with Gone with the Wind (1939). How much were you thinking about evoking a reaction from audiences based on that memory?
Well, it wasn’t just at the beginning of the film—you have to remember it’s the montage at the end of the film too, which nobody expected, right? What Spike did was brilliant, using Gone with the Wind, and then the George Wallace stuff. When you get to that end of the film, you’re thinking that, Oh, that was our past. You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden, this montage comes up, with the murder [of Heather Heyer]. There is a strategic plan in place to create that type of reaction. But it’s the degrees to which people respond that’s always different, because of their experiences. Like, my kids responded to it in a way that was very powerful for them, but they don’t have that history—I remember George Wallace, you know what I mean? I remember when I was a little kid, I still remember when all of that stuff was going on. I have visions in my brain of my parents and family members…I think I remember—I was really little—I think it was when Kennedy was shot. I have this memory of my uncle, being in a house running to the television. “They killed him, they killed him, they killed him.” You know what I mean? So that’s my reaction to it. And other people my age will probably have similar feelings, but my kids have a different reaction. Spike knows that, and he knew what he was doing by strategically placing those things at the bookends of the story.
Those bookends remind me of Bamboozled (2000), which has a similar use of montage and music, a similar interplay of history and memory.
Well, I’m trying to remember—I think one of those montages is set to that Bruce Hornsby song. I can’t remember exactly where it is. But the thing that was really interesting about that film was that we start out in black and white, and then we switch into color, right? Well, we did a similar thing with the music. We started out in mono,and we broke into full surround later on in the film. And that was all an artistic choice, trying to show the evolution, people’s development. But it’s like anything else: you try to allow the visuals to influence what it is you’re responding to, and allow that response to be real. Just go with it.
You know, that’s the thing that I’ve been learning, more so than anything. When I try to second guess my guesses, or second guess myself about what other people would like to hear, it’s always wrong. But if I just go with my gut reaction to it….I keep going back to The Woman King. I remember looking at the first scene with the Agojie coming back to the village. And all of a sudden I just started to hear this—I call it my Ladysmith Black Mambazo moment—kind of thing, with that melody and the way the harmonies move with the voices. And I remember telling myself, I don’t know if Gina’s going to like this, but I’m just going to go with it. I’m just going to go with it, do it and just see where it goes. And she fell in love with it. So all of the young artists out there, that’s the thing that I would tell you: learn your skills, have your skills together to be able to service and help tell a story, but don’t forget what your reactions are to what it is that you’re looking at and experiencing.
How much do you talk to your students about that? About balancing the art and business, the gigging and score-writing?
It’s like being in the NBA: it doesn’t necessarily always have to do with your talent. I mean, look, the talent has to be there, obviously. But a lot of it is opportunity—that’s hard. It’s really a hard thing because we don’t have a draft like the NBA. So it’s a matter of trying to find a way to have somebody hear what it is that you’re capable of doing. And that’s always rough. A lot of people start out being mentored, and that kind of gives them a foot onto the playing field. That’s why Sundance Film Labs and things like that are very important—they’re not only teaching you, but you’re being exposed to professionals who come in to teach, whether it be directors, writers, or composers, and they get a chance to see your talent, hear your talent. I mean, look, man, it can be very lucrative for anyone who has success in it, but again, it’s a serious crap shoot.
I was thinking about this earlier. I’m thinking about Kyrie Irving. He may go back to the Finals if they can get past the Timberwolves. And I’m sitting here saying to myself, Okay, this is a guy that’s been through it. I mean, he has a championship, but he’s been through it, then went to Brooklyn, had all these other things that have been going on in his life. And now he’s getting a chance to come back to it. Well, what about people like Charles Barkley, who had the talent and never got there? It’s the same thing in our business. And you can’t be deterred by that. That’s the thing. You can’t let that affect you in a way where it makes you bitter, or angry. No, we all have ways of finding opportunities to express ourselves artistically, you know? Once you find that, you gotta take advantage of it, to the best of your ability. That’s what I tell my students: don’t take anything for granted, any of it. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care how small you think it is. You have to work to your fullest at any given thing that you do. Because you never know who’s gonna be able to hear you. You never know who’s gonna hear what it is that you’re doing and find out what you’re able to do. So, do everything like it’s your last time. Art Blakey used to tell us that all the time, and I wrote a tune about it called “Tomorrow’s Just a Luxury.”
In terms of meeting that person who hears you: was it School Daze (1988), where you first met Spike?
Well, I didn’t compose for that. I played on School Daze. I played on Do the Right Thing (1989). Then obviously, Mo’ Better Blues (1990). Mo’ Better Blues was the first thing I had written, which was for one scene. Then the first full film score that I had done was Jungle Fever (1991).
That’s my favorite score and movie.
You know, there’s something so different about that film, man. Spike had such a different vision. I keep thinking about the beginning of that movie where the kid is like, you know, delivering the newspapers. He throws the paper, and they shot it, then made it slow motion. But you know what was funny, man? I’m not breaking any confidences, it happened over 30 years ago, but one of the sound guys, when we went to one of the first playbacks of the shot, he made that playback sound like an F-15. I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, bring it down, bring it down. It’s not that dramatic!
But that makes total sense to me! That movie, especially that sequence, it’s so full of life. It’s this amazing sequence of sounds. You get Stevie in the credits. And then you get the beginning of your score, which feels both familiar—sort of something you’d hear in like a Sirk melodrama—but then it also has these almost-Copland flourishes. And it’s all in dialogue with that almost over-lush photography.
Listen, man, it’s interesting to hear you say that. Because what it was for us at the time was, we’re working with a guy who’s putting our culture on the screen. You know what I mean? In a way that we’ve never seen before. And that was the thing for me, because I’m looking at it going, Wow. I hope I say this the right way: it’s one of those things you can’t really quantify because you’ve never seen anything like it. So you don’t know how to place it, you know, at the time when you’re doing it. You just know that it’s important, right? And then as time passes, you look back at it and you go, Oh, okay. I was glad I was part of that because we were taking our culture and putting it on the screen in ways that you had never seen before.
How often are you able to recognize that you’re in a moment like that? Whether it’s playing a gig or working on a specific project, how do you ride that line between spontaneity and, like, reverence? If that makes sense?
Man, we talk about that all the time. I talk about that with actors, too. It’s about being in the moment. That’s what you’re talking about. It’s allowing the moment—and whatever that vibration is—to come through you, not stifle it. You stifle it because of ego, you know what I mean? Because your ego says, Oh man, that’s not what’s hip. Art Blakely used to tell us all the time: never be too hip, because ‘two hip is making ass.’ I live my life by that, right? It’s like, Am I trying to be too hip or too slick? Should I just relax and allow the music to be what it’s supposed to be? There was an actor who told me about the time he played a real-life character in a film. And he said that for some reason, when they said action, and he started to deliver the lines, he said it wasn’t him. The scene was so powerful that when they cut, they didn’t call him by his name, they called him by his character’s name. That’s like being a musician sometimes.
Sometimes you just have your greatest performance. That’s why sometimes it’s hard for players to accept praise. Listen, some people do that because they have this false humility thing. But the guys that I know who are really earnest about what it is that they do, they have problems accepting praise because sometimes you feel like that’s not you. You feel like you’re a vessel, like you’re being used, in some form or capacity. You’re not doing it for the praise, you’re doing it for the moment. You’re doing it for that moment, to be that vehicle of healing. I was telling these students the other day: All of you guys are in this room because there was a piece of music that hit you and wouldn’t let you go. You couldn’t run away from it. And that had such an impact on your life that it caused you to say, Man, I wanna do that. Now it’s your turn to be that for other people. Right? And the only way to do that is to learn your craft as much as you can, learn your technique. Work at it, all of those things, and then allow yourself to be in touch with the universe.
I mean, I’m thinking now about Da 5 Bloods and the Marvin Gaye in it, and “What’s Going On,” and the questions we ask of music. To heal us, to comfort us, to challenge us—do you find that that changes for you?
What do you mean? What changes?
I guess the question we ask of music, why we turn to it in a given moment. Is it to grieve, to heal, to provoke? And how much can it take from us as a listener?
Well, it’s all of those things. It can make you laugh, it can pull you out of depression—other times, it can put you into depression. The interesting part about music for me, that part that drives my wife and my kids crazy, is, man, sometimes I hear a piece of music and it’s that right moment where my energy is in a certain frame, and that piece of music really cuts right…I can listen to it all day. Same track. And my kids would be like, Can you put something else on? Can you change it? I’m like, No! Because I’m so fascinated by what’s going on here. Really, I’m always constantly asking a question: What is it? What is it about this that has me drawn to it? There’s different things at different times. But the fascinating part comes when I can break it down technically and theoretically, understand it, and then use those things in my music. And then I come back to it years later and it feels different. So to me, that’s going back to being all about the moment.
Does that ephemerality feel hard to get right in a film? Like, is it hard to make a film really about music, or even about musicians? What was it like on Mo’ Better Blues, to make a film about jazz?
That wasn’t hard, that was fun. Because you’re eager to have the world see your world. Working on Mo’ Better Blues was a gift. I got a chance to work with Denzel and Wesley Snipes, Bill Nunn, you know, and the late great Robin Harris, who was a joy to be around, man. He was a nice guy. Funny as hell, but also just a nice guy. That moment in my life was exciting and exhilarating because I’m seeing this film being made about what we do. You know? And, whenever we would do the music shots, I was always out there watching Denzel, helping him through stuff. But look, he’s Denzel Washington. He didn’t need too much for me. It was amazing to witness and watch: Spike was brilliant about knowing how to meld our culture into that world and framework and still bring humor and entertainment to it. It wasn’t a documentary. It wasn’t that at all. It was a movie about our lifestyle. But in that movie, there was everything you needed—humor, drama, heartache, all of that stuff. And that, to me, was, like, the beginning of learning the process of telling stories on the screen.
Oddly enough, being on the set for that film, coaching Denzel, that was a huge learning curve for me. Huge. Because when we watch a movie, man, we don’t know how many other people are standing behind the camera. We don’t realize that there’s a continuity person that has to move all of those things back when they go back to do another take, making sure the actors’ faces are shaved consistently! There’s makeup people running around, wardrobe people. All of that stuff, man. And with all of that going on, the actors still have to make it look natural, like nothing happened. So to me, all of that happens because you have a desire to tell a story. That was the thing: don’t take anything for granted when it’s your turn to tell a story. Even if it’s “just” music. Turn over every stone to make sure that you convey what it is that you wanna convey.
The more I think about that film…because I’d been on sets before, but this, you know, with Mo’ Better Blues, I’m there watching the process daily, watching them set up shot after shot, watching how long that takes. As soon as they finish a scene: All right, moving on! And man, next thing you know, Denzel’s in his trailer. We may be just sitting there hanging out, talking about some other stuff, an hour goes by and they say, Hey man, I think they’re ready for you. Because not only are they setting up the shot, they’re moving sets around, gotta move the cameras. The thing that cracks me up is that you do all of that stuff to put the movie out for somebody to go, Eh. That’s why you can’t take it for granted.
How important was it for you all to get the trumpet stuff right with Denzel?
Oh man, look: no disrespect to Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier. They’re great actors, right? But we kept saying we don’t want Paris Blues (1961). And we figured out early on that Denzel needed to blow like he was playing. So we put something in the bell, which allowed him to actually blow. He learned how to buzz and get a sound out of his instrument. I started writing out the fingerings on a piece of paper. And then he could [mimics trumpet fingers.] Once I gave those to him, then he had something that he could practice at his own tempo. Something concrete. Man, that got him over the hump. And then another thing I told him, I said, Hey bro, even when you’re not on set, when you’re at home, always have the horn in your hand. Because you’ve got to get to the point where it looks natural. Because if he became self-conscious about how he was holding the horn, the whole thing was blown. So just keep it in your hand. Little things like that. You know, people don’t think about it, but otherwise, we’d break the illusion.
I was an exceedingly okay trombone player for about 10 years, and I would get holes in the left knee of all my jeans, based on the specific way I sat when playing the horn. And I didn’t realize that that was what caused these consistent holes.
Man, look, my thumb here [holds up hand] little calluses on it, just from holding my horn. It’s little stuff like that, that you never notice. The one that always cracks me up, man: I remember years ago being in a movie theater with my wife, and I put my arm around her, right? And as my arm is around her hugging her like this, all of a sudden you know, this starts to happen [mimics trumpet fingerings]. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. And then she slaps my hand! But that’s all part of the whole thing—there’s one scene with Denzel, you see him doing the fingerings to himself. Because I told him a story about Woody Shaw. I was on a bus ride with Woody Shaw. A lot of people had fallen asleep on the bus. And when I woke up, man, Woody was sitting there on the bus by himself like this [more trumpet fingers in the air], practicing the method.
At my most egghead, I think about Chaucer writing “Sound is naught but air broken.” There’s something to that gesture, to the rehearsal of breaking the air, the suggestion that once the occasion arises, you’re ready to just tap into the music already in the air.
You know, that’s the thing about film scoring. Working with a director like Spike, I’m another character in the film. You know what I mean? There are other films where that’s not the case. There are other films where I’m just backdrop, totally. But in Spike’s films, it’s interesting: I can tell when it’s time for my character to step out. Because he gives you space. It’s interesting to me because in other films, you’re just, like, sonic ambience, right? In Spike’s films, you’re sonic ambience with melodic content. And then all of a sudden that melodic content stops being the backdrop and steps out into the front and takes a solo. And then it goes back into the background again. But it’s always kind of there.
And the thing with his films, you have to figure out a way of presenting that melodic content without it overwhelming a scene. Especially the scenes that have important dialogue or information about character development. That was a learning curve for me. Other films didn’t have that, didn’t require me to do that. But now, the interesting thing is that it’s become a thing that people expect from me, because of all of the films that I’ve done with Spike. It took me a while to get accustomed to people saying, I want you to do that thing you do. I’m like, well, what? Can you be a little more specific? Can you clue me in? But I didn’t realize how different it was from other films until I got a little older and started checking out other things. Because of Spike, I’ve had to develop this style of scoring films with a lot of melodic content scenes where you wouldn’t think there would be that. And so I guess in certain terms, it is like musical air, you know. But the air fluctuates.
Does it feel closer to what’s going on in opera?
You know, it feels a lot closer to opera to me. I mean, the beginning of Miracle at St. Anna (2008), there’s a huge battle scene. And I remember that was one of the few times I had to rewrite something for Spike. Because when I did it first, man, I’m like, Bruh, battle scene, trumpet, orchestra, brass, percussion, thank you. So I started writing all of this very rhythmic, kind of syncopated stuff for the scene and Spike was like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He says no. And he said—he used the word—I want it to be operatic, where the music is making a sweeping commentary on the scene. And so then I had to go back and look at it again. And when I did, I said, Oh, okay, I get what he’s looking for.
Little did I know that I’d ever actually be in the opera world, you know, writing operas. But doing that work helped me with the opera. Now, here’s the other part of it too, that I started to realize later on. My father loved opera so much. I heard a lot of opera growing up as a kid, you know, inadvertently. Because it wasn’t like I was sitting down there with him, you know—I was a kid, I’m like, That’s my dad’s music. But all of a sudden it hit me one day: people always talk about my sense of melodic content. I wonder if that really came from hearing Carmen all the time. Hearing all of these different types of operas that had strong melodic content from the time that I was a kid.
My dad only took me to two movies growing up. One was Fiddler on the Roof (1971), the other one was The Jungle Book (1967). Because he was a music lover. He loved music. And I remember when I was a little kid, running around the house singing “If I Were a Rich Man.” You start to think, Oh, okay. That’s where this came from. This melodic sense that I have came from when I was a kid, my father playing all of this music that had strong melodic content.
And the fact that when the singing begins, it is tied to a moment of desire, right? It’s almost like the body is overwhelmed and can’t do anything but melody.
I’m overwhelmed that I can’t sing. My dad sang in the church choir, man, and I always tell people the story. They put me in the choir for one Sunday. They heard me sing. They were like: “Doesn’t he play the horn?”
I feel like you were in an interview once and said trumpet was your way of singing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I couldn’t sing, man! I mean, you know, that was the thing. I started to…I can’t even…I can kind of remember the feeling. I can’t remember the moment, like, all of a sudden that energy of being vocal came through what I was doing on the instrument. Yeah. Okay, I see what’s going on now. I really wanted to have the ability to sing, but something passed me by. But you find it.
What was it like then, to have to think about writing for the human voice, in your operas?
It was a challenge. It was terrifying at first because you have to write music for two hours, two and a half hours. And every instrument that I’d been writing for prior had a register of—let’s say, like this [holds hands far apart]—whether it be cello, brass, woodwinds, whatever. And then you get to the voice and the register is like this [holds fingers close together]. So I don’t have that. And then, even in this register, the voice is only powerful in a certain range. Lower down, it’s not necessarily negligible, but if you’re dealing with power and you need volume…so, man, that was a huge challenge for me. I felt like I was repeating myself. I shouldn’t say ‘repeating myself.’ I felt like my colors were being stagnant, because I kept writing in a similar register for all of the voices. But then I started to understand how to manipulate that.
I thought about this director friend of mine, Ron Shelton. I remember Ron was talking to me about certain actors. I forgot who it was—it was one actor he worked with who was a true professional, and he said they would always have a language. The actor had one level in close up, another for a shot of the torso, another for a full body shot. He would change the size of his motion. If he knew it was a close up, the motion was smaller. If he knew it was a full body shot, the motion was bigger. Right? That’s when I started to think, Oh, okay, well, I can use that analogy for writing for voice. Same thing. If this is the register I got, then the motion has to be this where it used to be this. You know what I mean?
I just watched Bull Durham the other night! It has such an amazing sense of scale, especially for the scenes of actual baseball. It’s always in motion.
Right, right, exactly, exactly.
The fact that so much of that scale is being dictated by the actors—how much do you and Spike talk about the actors and the music? Sometimes the performances are so big, but they don’t overwhelm. They don’t feel too big.
That’s always a fascinating point about film to me. I don’t know how to explain it, but sometimes you work on a scene and you go, Okay, maybe it’s done. But let me just try something else to add to this, to make it a little bigger. And then soon as you do it, you go, Oh, the scene can handle it. And then you go, Okay, well, let me put this here. And then you start to add these other things and you go, Wow, what was I thinking? The scene could really handle all of this. Prior to realizing that, I was thinking I was too much for a scene, that a scene couldn’t need all of that. But that’s the fascinating part about being a film composer to me, man. I remember getting that on a film I was working on called Bunraku (2010). I remember thinking, Okay, how many other scenes have I missed out on, man? So that became part of my paranoia, working on anything I work on after that. It’s like, Okay, well just go ahead and try. So my thing now is I’d rather take a wave than not add at all.
How did you find that level on something like Malcolm X (1992), which is this epic, that must have been freighted with mythic meaning. What can that story handle? What can a movie about Malcolm take?
The thing about that film, it was my second film that I’d ever scored in my life. Emotionally, I knew what I was going for. And we accomplished a lot with that film. I think it’s a great film. I think everything works well, but obviously having the experiences that I’ve had now, I’m actually mad—like, can I get another crack at it? My composition teacher, Roger Dickinson, he always said: Your ego ain’t what’s happening right now, that ain’t here. He always taught me that it’s telling you what it needs. You gotta learn how to listen. Put your ego aside. Because when you have expectations, you’re ignoring the reality. Because those expectations are based on something else. You have to just allow it.
So when we did the opening scene for Malcolm X, bro, that’s based off of something that happened to me in real life, dealing with Malcolm. I was terrified about hearing his speech, because I was a church boy. I had never heard nothing like that before. And where I was, everybody else was cheering it on. And I’m like, Whoa, what’s going on? So that’s why you hear the drum, with the heartbeat. And then you hear the big crash at the beginning, because the big crash was like my shock. It was like, Oh, you know, Martin Luther King always told us to turn the other cheek. Malcolm was not talking about that at all. He’s talking about how the revolution’s going to be bloody, you know? And it goes back to the thing we were talking about earlier: I allowed all of that energy to tell me what the score should be. And so the trumpet is the rage, behind all of that, right? The cello is the heartbreak in it. You know, Why do we have to go through this? Why are people treating us like this? That kind of sentiment. That’s what the cello is, and the trumpet is the more defiant kind of thing. And it worked out. It worked.
What was funny about that was Spike kept telling me, Hey man, just give me the theme on the piano. I realize now that I kept giving it to him with the harmony in it, right? And the way it moved. And he kept saying, I don’t think that’s for the opening. But I knew I didn’t want to do it like that for the opening. So I actually put together a mock recording of it, with some samples of me playing. And when he heard it, he said, Yeah, that’s it. And that was all based on these emotional moments I went through the first time I heard a Malcolm X speech in public. The music really feels in dialogue with the speech. It feels like it’s in conversation with those images all the time.
I remember we had finished Mo’ Better Blues and me and Denzel, we were talking on the phone one day. I asked him, I said, Man, you getting ready for Malcolm? And he went into one of Malcolm’s speeches. Over the phone. And it was eerie, dude. It was scary actually, to see how he could just channel out. And that was a wake up call for me to like, get my shit together. Being on a set for that, watching what was going on, the pressure that everybody was under, you know, it’s one of those things where you feel like you’re on the Bulls with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and you’re on a fast break and you’re the last dude—you can’t miss that shot. So while they were shooting, I was studying, doing my homework.
How different was the stress from Jungle Fever?
It was so much. We were on the set, man, doing the Billie Holiday scene with Miki [Howard]. And I remember we were going to lunch—they were just gonna take us up around the corner to a restaurant to have lunch. And the security guys, they walked us and they said, Okay, when you guys are finished, call us and we’ll come back and get you. And I’m like, no, man, I’ll walk. And the dude got really adamant. He said, Hey man, do not walk by yourself. We’ll come get you. And that’s when I realized all of the death threats that were going on, how serious it was, being on that set with all the other stuff flying around. The shit that Spike was getting, it was incredible, you know? And throughout all of that, we had to focus on making the movie.
And I remember saying to myself, All of this for a movie. But that’s the power of film. Because film helps to shape images for young people. It helps to really mold their mindset. And a lot of people knew that, and they didn’t want that story to be told. But I’ll tell you this, one of the proudest moments I ever had working on that film was I was in a barbershop in New Orleans and I had my Malcolm X hat on. I used to wear it all the time back then. And I walked into the barber shop, you know, Hey man, how you doing? You know, family barber shop, right? And the barber was saying, Hey man, this the boy who live up in New York, man. He played the trumpet blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Said, Oh man, that’s right. You work with Spike Lee, huh? Okay. They saw the X hat and the conversation quickly turned from me to the importance of the film, then to the responsibility Black men have to have in their communities, right? That was a powerful moment for me, man. Watching the transition of that conversation because of a film. And the film wasn’t even out yet. The film hadn’t been released yet. Everybody just knew that it was being made.
That was another one of those moments where I really started to see like, okay, this is powerful, this is incredible. I was very proud at that moment to be a part of it, because man, everybody was doing their best. Wynn Thomas, I’ll never forget, one of the set designers, Wynn Thomas. We were talking—he probably doesn’t even remember this conversation—and I was telling him about my fear of like, Okay, what do I need to do to score this movie? And he calmed me down. He said, Just do your job. He said, We all wanna do 150%, but the best thing we can do is just do our jobs. And man, when he said that, it was like, okay, stop tripping. Get to work, study, learn, and then create.
[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in the midst of the NBA playoffs. Kyrie did get past the Timberwolves.]