Trumpeter, composer and music educator Terence Blanchard was born in New Orleans on March 13, 1962, and began playing piano at age five, and trumpet at eight. His childhood friends in eluded Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and he studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. His composition teacher there was none other than Ellis Marsalis. Blanchard started his career in 1980 as a member of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, then Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He has composed more than forty film scores and performed on more than fifty. He received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Score on Spike Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman. From 2000 to 2011, Blanchard served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2011 he was named artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami. In the fall of 2015 he was named a visiting scholar in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music. In 2019, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), named Blanchard their Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, where he will remain until 2024. The Metropolitan Opera announced it will stage Blanchard's opera Fire Shut up In My Bones in their 2021-2022 Season, which will be the first production by a black composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera in the organization's 136-year history. Let’s wish the amazing Terence Blanchard a very happy birthday!