FAC to Launch 2024-25 Jazz Series with Multiple Grammy Winner Terence Blanchard on Sept. 26

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The Fine Arts Center will launch its 2024-25 jazz series on Thursday, Sept. 26, when celebrated trumpeter, composer and bandleader Terence Blanchard leads his band, E-Collective, and musical collaborators Turtle Island Quartet, in an evening of music from his critically acclaimed 2005 album “Flow” in the Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall at 8 p.m.

Blanchard, the winner of seven Grammy awards, is a veteran performer and bandleader currently operating at a high point in a career that has spanned more than four decades. Recognized as an outstanding trumpeter from the moment he emerged in the early 1980s as a member of Lionel Hampton Orchestra and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Blanchard is known today for his musicianship – standing out both through his own work and as a member of Herbie Hancock’s touring band – and his skills as a bandleader and composer.

He has twice been nominated for the Best Original Score Oscar, for his work on Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and “Da 5 Bloods.” In 2021, his opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” became the first by a Black composer performed by the Metropolitan Opera in its 138-year history.

The San Francisco-based Turtle Island Quartet is a stylistically adventurous string ensemble known for combining elements of European classical music, jazz, rock, blues and world music. The quartet has twice won the Grammy for Best Classical Crossover Album. In 2018, Blanchard, the E-Collective, and the Turtle Island Quartet collaborated on the album “Absence,” a tribute to the visionary jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

In their performance at UMass Amherst, the ensemble will focus on music from the Grammy-nominated “Flow,” on which Blanchard explored themes related to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theories on the connections between creativity, a sense of meaning and happiness.

The Fine Arts Center’s 2024-25 jazz series will continue Oct. 25 with a Max Roach Centennial Celebration featuring Makaya McCraven and will continue into 2025, culminating with “Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water – The Gospel of James Baldwin” on April 24. 

For more information, the 2024-25 events schedule or to purchase tickets for any of the jazz series performances, visit the Fine Arts Center website.