What happens when one award winner interviews another? Find out when Dave Drexler, host of the award-winning "Inside Art" interviews celebrated trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, this Sunday night at 6 p.m. PT.
This Sunday evening (Jan. 12), at 6 p.m. PT, host Dave Drexler welcomes back two of his favorite — and most accomplished — guests to the award-winning interview program "Inside Art," pianist Bill Mays and the prolific trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard.
Mays, just three months ago, co-headlined KSDS's spectacular Bud Powell Centennial celebration at the Conrad, along with Joshua White, Gilbert Castellanos, and Alan Broadbent. Early 2025 finds him back in our area, and not just to talk to Drexler (although that never hurts). The venerable pianist, whose youthful exuberance and sheer physicality at the piano belie his numeric age, will play a Jan. 23rd solo date in Temecula (at the Merc Theater), followed by a Jan. 26th trio date at Tio Leo's, where he'll be joined by bassist Rob Thorsen and drummer Jim Plank as part of the weekly jazz series hosted and curated there by flutist Holly Hoffman.
Bill Mays proved himself a national treasure when he electrified the audience with interpretations from the Bud Powell songbook back in Sept. 2024. What might Bill have to say about the role he played in KSDS’s Bud Powell Centennial celebration? You’ll have to tune in!
Six-time Grammy winner and Oscar nominated trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard will also join Drexler, no doubt to discuss the massive success he's had not just as a bandleader and recording artist but as a composer for screen and, most recently, stage.
After leading 20 jazz recording dates and scoring over 40 movies, Blanchard, over the last handful of years, has earned near unanimous acclaim, for composing opera. His first, Champion, “an opera in jazz” about former welterweight champ Emile Griffith who fought prejudiced attitudes about his sexuality — he was bisexual — and torment over having unintentionally killed an opponent in the ring, debuted in St. Louis in 2013 and earned critical praise in productions at SFJAZZ and The Kennedy Center.
Then, in late September 2021, Blanchard became the first Black composer to premiere an original opera at The Metropolitan Opera. With music by Blanchard and a libretto by actor/director/screenwriter Kasi Lemmons, Fire Shut Up in My Bones — an adaptation of New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s bestselling memoir about childhood trauma and its layered emotional fallout — opened the Met’s 2021-2022 season to tremendous fanfare.
After a revival at the Met in 2024, Blanchard brings his longtime band, the E Collective, to The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla on Jan. 19, where, joined by the Turtle Island Quartet (winners of a Grammy for string arrangements of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme) and guest opera vocalists Justin Austin (baritone) and Adrienne Danrich (soprano), they will present a suite of musical selections from the opera in a concert format.
If you're interested in exactly what that will look and sound like, tune in! That's Mays and Blanchard, in conversation with Dave Drexler, this Sunday night at 6 p.m. PT on "Inside Art."
