JAZZ : New Jack Meets a Young Lion : Terence Blanchard’s soundtracks for Spike Lee films have grabbed Hollywood’s attention, but his vision stretches from orchestral pieces to small performance groups

An open suitcase spilled clothes on the floor just inside the front door of Terence Blanchard’s Brooklyn apartment. Having just returned from a trip to his New Orleans birthplace, the trumpeter was about to leave for Hollywood to meet the director of “Mantis,” a two-hour television pilot for which Blanchard will compose a jazz score. Just don’t ask him who the director is.

“To be honest, man, I have no idea,” Blanchard says, laughing as he pushes his black rectangular-framed glasses up on his nose. “I have the details around here somewhere, but. . . .”

Things are moving fast for this puckish 31-year-old--so fast that when Blanchard recently agreed to score the new Wesley Snipes film, “Sugar Hill,” the press release announcing the deal was barely out before he had finished the recording session. Blanchard’s soundtracks for the Spike Lee films “Jungle Fever” and “Malcolm X” have attracted Hollywood’s attention and made him one of the first of the new jazz Wunderkinder to graduate from small-group hard bop to larger orchestrated works.

“I’ve always wanted to make music that would unfold like a film or theater piece,” he says. “I grew up listening to classical music and opera. And when you listen to some of Duke Ellington and (Charles) Mingus’ stuff, you hear these larger works.”

Thursday through Saturday at the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, Blanchard’s quintet will play music from another of those larger works, “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite,” the trumpeter’s third album as a jazz leader for Columbia Records. The suite is a 74-minute song cycle that uses a melodic motif from the “Malcolm X” soundtrack as the launching point for a portrait of the slain black leader sketched by Blanchard and his young band--drummer Troy Davis, bassist Tarus Mateen, pianist Bruce Bath and tenor sax player Sam Newsome.

Like a lot of new jazz, “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite” exudes a classicist’s reverence for the small-group sound of the late 1950s and early 1960s; the undulating Latinized rhythms of “Malcolm at Peace” recall Horace Silver, while the airy interweaving lines of Blanchard and Newsome seem to pay direct homage to Miles Davis and John Coltrane circa 1959. But the scale of this piece, with its interconnected compositions that return repeatedly to the same pensive melody line, points to Blanchard’s wider ambitions.

It was partly frustration that inspired “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite.” Blanchard had labored mightily over his soundtrack to “Malcolm X,” spurred by Lee’s advice to think big (the director suggested he go see “Spartacus”). The final soundtrack--which incorporated a 60-piece orchestra, large jazz ensemble, the Harlem Boys Choir, a bevy of supporting players and a dash of Middle Eastern oud music--was widely regarded as Blanchard’s most ambitious and fully realized work. But the performer in him was frustrated at having only one chance to hear the music performed, so he recast some of the ideas for a small group.

Blanchard has worked on every Spike Lee film except the first, “She’s Gotta Have It,” and he has already agreed to compose the soundtrack for the next, “Crooklyn,” in January. The trumpeter’s newly renovated duplex is about half a mile from the director’s Forty Acres and a Mule operation in the artistically thriving black neighborhood of Ft. Greene, N.Y. Yet Lee and Blanchard are something of an odd couple--one a provocateur whose films helped shape the “New Jack” radical aesthetic, the other a traditionalist who is part of the neoconservative “Young Lions” movement in jazz.

Indeed, Blanchard recalls that the first time he heard Malcolm X’s voice, he felt more discomfort than empathy. “It scared the s--- out of me,” he recalls. “I was 13, living in New Orleans in a summer jazz program, and we were playing outside in a park when they put a Malcolm X album on during a break.” In his most radical Nation of Islam mode, Malcolm was denouncing “blue-eyed devils” and “Uncle Toms” to the cheers of a crowd that was gathered a decade after his death.

“People are sitting there going, ‘Yeah!’ and I’m thinking, ‘Now wait a minute,’ ” Blanchard says, recalling that his ambivalence was made worse by the fact that he had never heard of Malcolm X. “At that time in my life, I was just starting to come to terms with what was going on in this country. Before that, man, I was naive.”

The year was 1975 and Blanchard had recently befriended a couple of other New Orleans teen-agers--Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis. Blanchard, raised in the city’s suburbs, inherited his musical leaning from his father, an insurance company employee with a baritone voice and a serious passion for both opera and the prewar jazz of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. Blanchard and the Marsalis brothers, on the other hand, worshiped newer idols.

“We just wanted to be real hip. Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, John Coltrane--that was it. If I had met John Coltrane you could have shot me right there and I would have been cool.” Blanchard laughs at the memory. “I didn’t wanna hear nothing about Louis Armstrong, man.”

Today, Blanchard has an original prewar Louis Armstrong 78-r.p.m. record framed on the living room wall above his state-of-the-art stereo rack; next to it is a mounted example of Armstrong’s personal correspondence. Like Wynton Marsalis, Blanchard now worships Armstrong as the wellspring from which all modern jazz springs. And like Marsalis, Blanchard learned about Armstrong partly by studying at the feet of the great drummer Art Blakey.

By the time Blanchard replaced Marsalis in Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1982, he had studied music at the New Orleans Center for Creative Artists and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. But Blakey was his formative influence, imparting raspy wisdom and deflating some cherished notions about the trumpeter’s idols: “When you’re a kid you tend to put your favorite musicians on the pedestal and think they just come up with this stuff out of nowhere,” Blanchard says. “But when I started playing with Art and actually watching him play stuff that I heard on record, then the music became real.”

Meanwhile, the phenomenal success of Marsalis’ early records had created a talent-searching frenzy at the jazz labels, which were about to launch the Young Lions phenomenon on an unsuspecting jazz world. By the age of 21, Blanchard had recorded his first session as a co-leader, “New York Second Line,” with Donald Harrison, the tenor sax player with whom he would collaborate on four later albums. Blanchard also worked as a hired hand on the soundtracks to the Spike Lee films “School Daze,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues” before forming his own quintet and signing with Columbia in 1990.

Through it all, Blanchard stuck to the hard-bop purism that the Young Lions staked out as their counteroffensive to the spread of fusion and FM jazz lite. That approach has either been a welcome return to the music’s roots or a creative cul-de-sac, depending on your aesthetic perspective. But like his friend Wynton Marsalis, whose most recent record was an Ellington-style jazz suite called “Citi Movement,” Blanchard appears ready to move on to more ambitious projects.

Looking back, he thinks his busily orchestrated score for Lee’s 1991 film “Jungle Fever” betrayed his “nervous naivete--I felt like I had to justify all these musicians just being there.” The “Malcolm X” soundtrack was a more assured work, and Blanchard is currently working on a new 45-minute piece for his quintet that will make its debut this fall at New York’s Lincoln Center, where Marsalis helps run the jazz program.

Then there’s Hollywood, which is forcing Blanchard to stray from certain sacred tenets of jazz purism. For the soundtrack to the Snipes film “Sugar Hill,” about a drug entrepreneur whose conscience catches up to him, Blanchard was actually shoe-horned into using synthesizers, those evil electronic gadgets that helped create the worst excesses of jazz fusion. He was also forced to work fast--very fast.

“I had to do it in 10 days,” Blanchard admits. “But put that in small print, at the bottom of the article.”