c. 2007 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

WASHINGTON _ Two years after Hurricane Katrina, it may be that one of the most searching spiritual responses to the deluge and disaster has come not from a theologian but an acclaimed jazz musician.

Trumpeter, composer and bandleader Terence Blanchard’s new CD, “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina),” is being praised as a masterwork, a triumph, and one of the most important jazz releases of the year.

Part of the reason is the message behind the music, and that message begins with the title, says Blanchard. How could something so devastating and terrible be God’s will? Why does God permit disaster? Is God trying to tell us something in the wake of Katrina?

“In the Christian faith we have a saying,” Blanchard said in an interview. “God acts in strange ways. I think this was a way for God to get our attention. Maybe this is a way for us to kind of stop and take a hard look at what we’re doing as a community.”

On one level, “A Tale of God’s Will” can be heard as a meditation on the Almighty and his purposes.

“In the aftermath of Katrina, when you’re faced with that level of devastation and you’re frustrated beyond belief, you’re hurt beyond anything you can imagine, I mean it causes you to dig deep and try to find some answers,” Blanchard explains.

“I went through the whole thing of blaming man for his neglect in servicing the levees, and blaming men for their neglect in rescuing and helping people. And I talked to some other friends of mine, who are also Christians and believers, and you know we all just started talking about it saying, well, there has to be a bigger picture here, there has to be a bigger story. There has to be something for us to learn from this.”

Blanchard, 45, who was born in New Orleans and has lived there most of his life, says he used to play every Sunday at Central Congregational Church. “My father used to tell me all the time, `I don’t care what time you get in from playing your gig Saturday night, you’ve got to get up and go to church and play on Sunday morning.”’

He also went with his mother to her Baptist church, where the music was mostly gospel.

“That music had a profound effect on me,” Blanchard said, “because at the core of that music is honesty, you know, it’s truth, and that’s what stuck with me, you know, and that’s what I still have, and when it came time to record the music for this album, that’s what I drew upon.”

Blanchard says he remembers living as a child in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans when Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965 and seeing nothing but water as he was picked up from his porch and put into a boat.

“Levees” _ Blanchard’s second piece on the new CD _ “is all about that,” he said. “The strings represent the water that’s just everywhere, and the trumpet represents the cries for help that just went unheard.”

Some of the music on the CD was originally composed by Blanchard for director Spike Lee’s 2006 HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke.” But the new CD also includes many tracks not from the movie, such as pianist Aaron Park’s lyrical, consoling benediction “Ashe,” based on a West African Yoruba word for “and so it shall be,” and drummer/percussionist Kendrick Scott’s “Mantra,” the word for a mystical or religious syllable or sound.

“When we were listening to the playbacks,” says Blanchard, “the thing I kept thinking about with this music is that not only is it hopeful music, but it embodies a number of other emotions _ hopeless, helplessness, anger, and frustration.”

It’s hard not to wonder how such beautiful sounds _ one review of the new CD describes the music as “lush melody and woeful wails, pockets of grace, and flood waters of melancholy” _ were inspired by an event that was so ugly. Blanchard pondered that as he remembered returning to his mother’s destroyed house after Katrina.

“The only thing I heard was silence. I didn’t hear any insects, no birds, no dogs barking, nobody cutting the grass, no cars moving, nobody moving around. Nothing. Only air, only the wind. People were asking me immediately, you know, `Are you going to write music based on the hurricane?’ And I kept telling them … this thing is so vast it’s hard to kind of assimilate anything, and I don’t hear anything right now. How do you write music for something that’s so tragic, so horrible?”

Blanchard’s horn and his band tell the tale of Katrina’s destruction and its aftermath with powerful sounds that wail and weep and whisper, but he says the music is not the end of the story.

“I don’t want people to think that New Orleans is fine,” he says, “and that we’re moving on to another issue. No, New Orleans is not fine. People are fighting tooth and nail to bring their communities back.”

“I wanted the trumpet to scream on every track,” he says in his official artist bio. “But I feel that God is using me to speak for all the souls in New Orleans.”

(A version of this story first appeared on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.” This article may be reprinted by RNS clients. Please use the Religion & Ethics Newsweekly byline.)

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Two photos of Terence Blanchard are available via https://religionnews.com.

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