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Blanchard is a Grammy Award winning jazz trumpeter, composer and music educator who composed the score for Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018). Blanchard is a veteran of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He has released twenty solo albums, composed more than sixty film scores, and received ten major commissions. Among these are two operas in jazz commissioned by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis—Champion which debuted in 2013, as well as the recently premiered Fire Shut Up In My Bones based on the memoir by Charles Blow. Blanchard has also composed work for Broadway revivals, plays, dance performances, and for national orchestras. An avid music educator, he served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now named the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) at the University of Southern California and was the artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami.