Music is like another character to Spike Lee. So it is not surprising that his longest collaboration — dating back more than three decades, beginning with School Daze — is with the man known as the most prolific jazz musician to ever score films, Terence Blanchard. The director from Brooklyn and the composer from New Orleans, both Golden Globe nominees, have done 17 films together so far, including Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, and BlacKkKlansman.
In 2003, Blanchard was nominated for a Golden Globe for his score of Lee’s 25th Hour.
It all began after Lee heard Blanchard riffing on the piano. He wanted to use the sounds and then asked if the musician — who was at that point mostly known as a master trumpeter — could write a string arrangement around it. This sparked Blanchard’s interest in film scoring, a job that he — who had seen himself as a jazz artist and bandleader, starting from when he studied with the Marsalis brothers at the renowned New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts — did not know existed.

Blanchard likes to tell his students: “A turtle never gets nowhere unless he sticks his neck out.” And he certainly did that when he committed himself to film music. Sometimes Blanchard even gets the chance to play his trumpet in a movie, like he did when he ghost-performed for Denzel Washington in Mo’ Better Blues.
Lee lets the music play its own and very equal part in his films, and proves this by never letting it fade into the background, a creative choice Blanchard appreciates very much.

In a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Blanchard spoke about the process of working with Lee: “With all of his films, the scripts are very compelling, but I’ve learned early on with Spike you can’t start writing music just based on that,” he said. “Because his vision is so unique that when I’m writing from a script, I’m writing based on my movie that I’m creating in my mind. And when you finally get a chance to see what he’s done, man, it can go in a lot of different directions. I’ve learned over the years just to be patient and wait to see something.”
No wonder Lee calls their ongoing collaboration a match made in heaven: between the words, the visuals, and the music, they have found a common language.