“He told me, ‘Stop thinking about writing an opera, just tell a story,’” Blanchard remembered. “That was extremely helpful for me, because then I wasn’t trying to live up to something.”
“Tell your story” is, of course, a catchphrase among jazz musicians. But partly thanks to his work with Dickerson, Blanchard has developed a special aptitude for using music to narrate ideas and convictions — which swiftly moves listeners past any fixation on genre. Dickerson also thinks of it as a reminder that complexity, nuance and misdirection don’t have to dilute narrative drive — or even relatability — but can in fact enhance a story line.
“He could pick up on little things that I would show him, and very quickly discover the inside meaning of it. That is, make it his own,” Dickerson said in an interview, remembering Blanchard’s interpretive skills even at age 16. That ideal — learn the fundamentals, and then make something undeniably yours — is something that Blanchard has passed on to his own students.
Ambrose Akinmusire, who studied with Blanchard in the 2000s, remembered him stopping class whenever he heard students making direct references to old jazz tropes. “We don’t do that here,” he recalled him saying.
On the flip side, Blanchard remembers having to convince the cast of “Fire” that they should draw upon their whole musical lexicon. “I’m listening to them warm up, and I’m realizing a lot of those singers grew up in the church, sang gospel, some of them were jazz singers — but they were all taught to throw that away when you sing opera,” he said.
“I said, ‘Listen man, bring all of that back to your performance. This is a current story, so hearing gospel in the middle of this is no problem. Hearing you sing a blues phrase, because you’re a jazz musician, is no problem. And, man, I can’t tell you the type of performances we got out of people.”
