In New Orleans, it's well-known that Blanchard's love for Black music is a gift he inherited from his teacher Roger Dickerson, the composer of the musical Preacher Man! Preacher Man! Produced at Ashé Cultural Arts Center shortly before COVID-19 shut down the city, it also displays the history of Black vernacular music-work songs, blues, sacred music, spirituals, and gospel-as well as the be-bop of classical jazz. Underwritten by a $1.25 million Ford Foundation grant, The Met was unstinting, hiring dozens of chorus members, dancers and supernumeraries to populate, harmonize and dance, jump for joy, and erotically writhe to a seductive score that is almost sublimely anchored in the Black musical idioms of jazz, blues, funk, and gospel.

Walter Russell III as Char'es-Baby and Will Liverman as Charles in Terence Blanchard's 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones.' Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera. The story plays out there and on the campus of Grambling State University, in the soft segregation years after Jim Crow had officially ended, but when Black provincial life was still lived separately under a seemingly open sky of largely foreclosed opportunity. Blow, the three-act opera, originally commissioned and developed by Opera Theatre of St. The Metropolitan Opera has ended its 138-year epoch of composer apartheid with the presentation of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, a production composed by New Orleans' most acclaimed living trumpet player, Terence Blanchard.īased on the coming of age memoir by Charles M.

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