When I met with the great composer Terence Blanchard to discuss his work scoring the Apple TV docuseries They Call Me Magic, about the life of NBA legend Magic Johnson, I didn’t expect the interview to be so front-loaded with basketball talk, but that’s how it played out. I guess when you get a couple of guys from the same generation who love classic hoops, that’s what happens. While it took us a minute or two to get into his work on the series, we did get there. And when we did, Terence spoke as much about curiosity and collaboration as he did anything else. Blanchard has ascended to living legend status as a film composer and a jazz musician. He’s also a humble virtuoso, which is incredibly rare. A fact that is made clear in our conversation.
Awards Daily: Obviously you’re a fan of hoops. I assume that’s in part what brought you to this project. Were you a Lakers fan from the jump or just a Magic guy?
Terence Blanchard: Let me tell you how bad it was. Years ago, I got a call to play on this recording session for a film, School Daze. I walked into this session and I got on my Lakers hat, my Lakers t-shirt, and I had on my purple and gold Converse at the time. I didn’t know Spike Lee from Adam, I just knew who he was. When I walk in he looks me up and down and goes Lakers fan, huh? From that moment on he started taking me to the Knicks games. (Laughs).
Awards Daily: He’s a Madison Square Garden staple.
Terence Blanchard: Next thing you know he’s got me yelling “Take ‘em Pat (Riley). Take ‘em Pat!” It was fun, but that Showtime period was like a golden period in the NBA, the whole thing between Magic and Bird. I remember going to one of the games when the Knicks were playing the Celtics and we’re sitting courtside. You just never realize how big those dudes are. I remember seeing Dennis Johnson thinking he was my height, and it was like nope.
Awards Daily: When you’re watching from home, a guy who is six-foot-three looks small, but in person, next to average-sized people, they are huge.
Terence Blanchard: I think the thing about seeing them up close is to see those big bodies moving like that. It’s incredible. When I got a chance to see Magic play, it was like a field general out there on the court. He commanded the court in such a way that it was scary. The thing that I remember about the Laker team that I used to love is they played in such a way that whoever was hot that night got the ball.
Awards Daily: Because Magic would find them.
Terence Blanchard: Yeah. if it was Worthy, Worthy got the ball all night. If it was Byron Scott, Byron Scott got the ball all night. Cooper was out there on the three point line. And of course the chief, Kareem was the guy they would feed inside. I used to love watching that team because they played team ball and the Showtime fast breaks were amazing. I haven’t seen anything like that since then, man. It was an incredible moment in time, so when somebody calls you to do a story, a documentary about Magic Johnson, what the hell else you gonna say?
Awards Daily: It was an easy “yes,” right?
Terence Blanchard: I didn’t even know what it was paying, man. (Laughs). I didn’t. That wasn’t a concern. Just when do you need me? I was such a fan. I still am such a fan.
Awards Daily: There’s a sudden weight of nostalgia for that period and for those teams. Not only do we have the docuseries that you worked on, there’s also Winning Time and Hulu is doing a documentary series about those Lakers teams. Everything that was ever significant will find its way back into culture. Is there anything about this moment that is bringing the Showtime Lakers teams forward again?
Terence Blanchard: When you look at the NBA back then, could you see Bird in anything but a green jersey? Could you see Magic in anything but a purple and gold jersey? Those were the days when guys stayed with those teams. Now we have the greatest player in the NBA and he’s been on how many teams now?
Awards Daily: Three or four, depending on if you count Cleveland twice.
Terence Blanchard: Exactly. And you look at Kevin Durant, he’s been moving around. So, it’s a different period in time. Back then, when you rooted for any one of those teams back then – the Celtics, the bad boy Pistons, Chicago Bulls, the Lakers…
Awards Daily: Don’t leave out my Sixers!
Terence Blanchard: That’s true, that’s true. (Laughs). Man, they were there for a hot second. I remember I was playing a gig when they were in the finals back then. I will never forget it. That was the roughest gig I played. And I was in Philly! I was playing a gig in Philly and at the end of the set (we did two shows a night – I played a little theme song and introduced the band. This guy’s on piano, this guy’s on bass, thank you, and I ran to the bar to see what was happening with the game.
Awards Daily: What’s funny about that is it wasn’t hard for me to hate the Celtics because they were often in the Sixers’ way, but when they got to the finals, the Lakers were sometimes in their way too. I could never find it in myself to hate the Lakers because I loved to watch the way they played ball.
Terence Blanchard: I loved to watch both teams. I just was not a Celtics fan, but you could not disrespect that team. That was also one of the greatest teams assembled in NBA history. That rivalry was just something else. You remember when Kareem was down and Magic had to play center?
Awards Daily: I thought the Sixers had it! And then Magic pulls off one of the two greatest finals performances I’ve ever seen. The other one I would say would be Jordan – the flu game.
Terence Blanchard: I can’t remember the actual game. I don’t remember the series, but I remember I think it was the third quarter…back then once people got up by ten points you would almost assume that they were gonna win a game, because we didn’t have this fluctuation back and forth like we do now. They were down by a huge amount at the start of the third quarter and Magic’s thing was to get it down to ten. They spent an entire quarter doing that and next thing you know they came back and won that game. That was the thing that I loved about that team. They were disciplined, they were strategic, they were smart. The closest team to that to me these days are the Warriors.
Awards Daily: That was something Magic in the early years didn’t get credit for. I’ve always thought that was a racial thing. Larry Bird was a smart player, and Magic was a great athlete. Truth of the matter is, Magic was a great athlete but he wasn’t a great leaper, he wasn’t the fastest guy either. His passing skills were off the charts, he had excellent athleticism in other ways, but a lot of it was just being able to see the court in a way that no one else could. I always found it offensive that Larry Bird was a “smart” player and Magic was a great athlete.
Terence Blanchard: We used to make commentary about the guy that used to call the games back then, I forgot his name, we used to make jokes about it. He said Magic would pass the ball to Bryon Scott, Byron Scott would leap from damn near the top of the rafters and dunk the ball, – I think his name was Tommy Heinsohn – and Tommy Heinsohn would quietly say “Byron Scott scores two points.” and you go really? ! And all of a sudden Bird would come down the lane looking like he’s going five miles an hour and McHale would dunk it or whatever “Oh what a tremendous shot!” It was crazy back then.
Awards Daily: Tommy was a homer too. He was an old Celtic.
Terence Blanchard: It was so apparent. It was like dude, really? We used to laugh it off back then, but still. I wasn’t a big basketball fan prior to that. It was Magic. I was a football guy. I was an NFL guy. But those years were the years, and then when the Lakers would lose to the Celtics, oh that off season was just the roughest. I couldn’t take it.
Awards Daily: Maybe I’m full of it here, but I think of Magic as funk and Kareem as jazz.
Terence Blanchard: Definitely.
Awards Daily: You’re a natural jazz man obviously. You have a classical background, and composing for film is often akin to classical music. You also layered in some funky stuff too. This show really allowed you to access your whole repertoire in a way that maybe other projects didn’t.
Terence Blanchard: It definitely did. Also you have to understand, the thing about this documentary that I wanted to capture musically, is that the Lakers played with a flow. If they got on a fast break, you must account for that. When you watch some of the stuff in the series, that’s what I was seeing. Then there’s the whole thing of Kareem being the elder statesman and being the quiet general and being the thoughtful person so there had to be that element to the music as well. The beginning of the documentary when Magic comes into the locker room with the boombox just kind of sets the stage for what could happen musically throughout the entire documentary. Also, when I think about basketball, more so than with the NFL, basketball is about improvisation.
That’s where jazz comes into play in the score. While those guys have set plays, they’re all improvising. They’re all doing it in sync with each other based on a certain type of philosophy that they have for any team that they’re on. That was something that inspired me in terms of writing the music, because I knew that I wanted to have some groove based music to help propel certain situations, but then give it room. Even when there’s grooves, when you don’t have a melodic content to it all the time, it can feel stagnant. Allowing the musicians to improvise and add their little phrases and add things to it kept the music fresh and kept it flowing.
Awards Daily: They say that athletes rarely have a third act, but Magic is a man who clearly has a third act. There’s a lot of social significance in this time period and through sports. This is the Reagan era and there are racial factors in play as well. The NBA was unfairly seen as a thug league. There was also a piece of innocence in that period – the league was not the corporate entity in such a fulsome way that I think it is now. One thing that I thought you were doing, you do mix in a number of joyful sounds, but there were times when I feel like you are cutting against the grain. Not so much during the game sequences, but in other moments. It’s like you’re reminding us that this moment is important. Even if Magic is smiling on the screen, what’s happening there is significant and the music tells you that too.
Terence Blanchard: One of the things that I didn’t want people to get lost in the fray is that Magic and Bird probably did more for race relations than a lot of people in this country back then. These guys, while they were fierce competitors I mean fierce competitors. They obviously didn’t like each other at first, one of the things they never did was disrespect each other. They always understood each other. They were brilliant athletes. It’s a documentary, we wanted it to be fun obviously because it’s Magic and it’s the Lakers, but there’s that social aspect to it where the music has to remind us all of this joyous stuff was happening in the midst of all of these other issues that were going on in the country.
I think that it’s really important for people to realize that, especially younger people who didn’t necessarily experience it the way that we did, that we have these struggles, but as people the only way that we move forward is to respect everybody’s differences and respect what everybody brings to the table. When you look at them talking about the bad boy Pistons – to me that had a racial component to it too. The Lakers were the gold standard and all of a sudden here came these other guys who were doing whatever they could (playing a rugged style) to get there. You gotta respect that too. It wasn’t the way that I would play the game, but I understood their motivation. It was a combination between having these joyous rides in the documentary and then the reality of what’s going on in the country.
Awards Daily: You had to go into some really darker places too with the score because there’s the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict and, of course, Magic’s battle with HIV. I remember watching his press conference thinking I was looking at a dead man. We all did.
Terence Blanchard: Hopefully what I did, what I was trying to do, was make the joyous moments more joyous by not downplaying the serious stuff – not shying away from it. To me that’s what made all of the other stuff more important and more celebratory. The fact that in the midst of all of us finding out that he might die, in a time when that’s all we knew about people who were afflicted with this virus, we were all torn up. But he was still going out there giving us something to cheer about.
That was hard to try to put into context musically. If he gets cut, what’s gonna happen. There were a lot of players back then who didn’t want to deal with it. I understand it, because we didn’t know anything about the virus. I get it. So then having to do that musically was rough, man. I could have gone really dark with it, but the thing that I’ve learned over my career is that once I develop a certain color palette for a show, I try to stay within that color palette. That’s the thing that helps create context. Even though it was a dark moment, I tried to stay within my color wheel for the show. At first, I remembered what I felt when I heard the news. Initially the music was going to be a lot darker.
Awards Daily: I imagine what you were thinking was that if I go too heavy-handed here it messes with the overall tone of the show.
Terence Blanchard: Exactly, and it was something that would stick out like an aberration and I didn’t want that.
Awards Daily: There are a lot of needle drops in the show. A lot of funky ones too. When you’re trying to work with the needle drops, at times I can feel you contrasting with them. Is that right?
Terence Blanchard: Yeah, because the thing is, the needle drops give you a sense of time and space. With the score, at least the way I try to approach it, I want the score to make it universal and timeless. At the same time you can’t exactly ignore what’s happening with the soundtrack. That’s why, as I was saying earlier, I created a sound palette for the show like for anything that I do. The sound palette for this show included some electric piano and some of the sounds in the music that we used in the soundtrack. I may not use it in the same way, but I try to have some of those similar colors. Even though I may go contrary to what you hear from a song, it’s not so far off the path that it just comes out of nowhere.
Awards Daily: The PR from the show gave me three pieces of music to listen to to prep for this. It is interesting hearing them in isolation, much different from hearing them with the flow of the show. I hope you take this as a compliment, I was listening to one of the three pieces that I was thinking at one point “I think Terence should do a Michael Mann movie.” Michael Mann’s movies have that simmering sort of vibe. I’m hearing some of that here. You know what I mean?
Terence Blanchard: I got a chance to work with Michael Mann for a hot second for a TV show called Tokyo Vice.
Awards Daily: You worked on Tokyo Vice?!
Terence Blanchard: I did the first episode.
Awards Daily: I did not know that. I’m a huge fan, I’ve watched every episode three times. I missed your credit on the first episode, damn. (Laughs).
Terence Blanchard: I wasn’t the only composer, but I did get to work with Michael Mann. I get what you’re saying. That’s one of things about being a film composer that I love, which takes me away from the jazz thing: when I’m doing my jazz stuff, it’s my world, it’s my wheelhouse, it’s my musical personality, but what I’m trying to say is that all of these shows are different puzzles. The thing about them is they become really attractive, because when you start to put all the pieces together to work with, that’s the thing that allows you to kind of move into different directions.
One of the things that I was telling my students is that you’ve gotta surrender yourself to the situation. Don’t come into the situation trying to manipulate it into something that you’re comfortable with. The way that I work on They Call Me Magic, is something totally different than I would do for another documentary. That’s the other thing that made it exciting about working on it. Obviously it’s about Magic and I’m a big Magic fan, but the other part of it, realistically, is that the scenario itself will allow me to do something different that I won’t get a chance to do in some other documentary.
Awards Daily: It’s interesting you say that. A couple of years ago I spoke to Trent Reznor, who is a very different type of composer than you. He obviously has a very healthy career, outside of composing for film, with his own band, and you have the same. One thing that he said is that one thing really informs the other because when you’re doing your own thing you make all the choices and decide what you want to do but when you’re at the service of something else it makes you try new things that you might not otherwise.
Terence Blanchard: Let me put it this way, if you’re open to it as an artist, they both can inform each other. I don’t try to separate them, saying this is film and this is my jazz wall – while there are obvious delineations between the two. The trick of it is to allow those organic crossovers to happen. One of the reasons I have an electric band now is when I started doing film work, I started working with ambient sounds and all different types of cultures to write music. Then I thought man, I could use those colors in my band. Why not have this color and not just use a straight jazz quintet?
That started to open me up to all those other things. Then obviously when it comes to dealing with film, being an improvisational musician really helps you to think quickly and come up with ideas. There are times when I’m working on a scene and I just feel like something’s not right. Why isn’t this working? I like it up to this point. Then sometimes as a jazz musician I just scrap the whole thing and start over. Having the background to be able to improvise allows me to shake that off and say let me try another approach. Actually sometimes that really helps, because sometimes you’re beating a dead horse trying to figure out what’s going wrong with something when you may not realize it’s the entire thing.
Awards Daily: You are finding things to incorporate that you might never have thought of before if you hadn’t been composing for film and tv.
Terence Blanchard: Without a doubt. What starts to happen is that jazz is not a jazz quintet: trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. Jazz is an ideology. What starts to happen as a result of doing film is that you look at all the film stuff and you look at all these instruments as colors. If I’m looking at them as colors, what colors do I want to use to tell my story in the world of jazz? The other part of it that’s true too is that sometimes in film as a composer I try to make sure that my ego doesn’t get so involved to the point where…I know some composers that just want to control everything. Because I’m the composer, I have to control it. No, no, no. What it is is you assemble a cast, just like you would for a film. Even with They Call Me Magic, I allow the other musicians to give input, I allow the guys to play, because those organic moments are stuff that you can’t put down on paper. I don’t care how much you try, you just can’t. Sometimes with They Call Me Magic, we would just play. I’d be like what was that what was that? And I’d say hey man, let’s keep that.
Awards Daily: Play it until you find it.
Terence Blanchard: Yeah, man. Then the guys would strike up a certain type of groove and I’d say aw y’all didn’t do that on that take. Some of the takes would be different and I’d say oh man I really like that tag, let’s do another version of that. That part really makes it fun when you’re in the studio. There’s not the pressure of saying I envision it to be this and it’s got to be this. It’s a fluid thing. I may have envisioned it to be that, but the reality is that is a starting point. You have to allow the music and the show to tell you where to go.
Awards Daily: If you stick too strongly to that first principle, you don’t allow anything else to walk in the door.
Terence Blanchard: You don’t allow it, and you’re stifling the creativity of the guys that are with you who are inspired by the subject just as much as you are. Especially with this. The drummer, Oscar Seaton, while we’re tracking some of the stuff for the scenes, he wants to hear the dialog because he’s listening to Magic’s interview.
Awards Daily: He’s getting caught up watching what’s going on.
Terence Blanchard: We’re over there playing and stuff and I’d say alright, cut. And he’s like yeah I remember that, man. I’m like dude, we gotta play. (Laughs).
Awards Daily: You’ve worked a lot more lately in television than you had before. Is there any particular reason, and is there any real difference between the two mediums for you as far as serving them?
Terence Blanchard: There’s no reason for it. It just happened to be the flow of my career. It seems like I’m doing more films again now. I just had a couple of films that I’ve scored. I think the main difference between the two is the same old thing everybody always says: that film is the director’s medium, TV is the producer’s medium. I think in film you get a chance to talk to one person. In TV you may talk to a couple. That’s the big difference for me. The real difference is the difference between documentaries and film. With a documentary, you just don’t want to step on the words. All of the words are very important, especially with a subject like Magic. He’s one of the most beloved figures in the world. You don’t want to get in the way of any of that important information.
Awards Daily: I think what you get out of this series that’s so great is how big he is. I don’t mean just as a famous person because that’s certainly true. I love the part where he joined the HIV/AIDS commission for President George HW. Bush and he didn’t just leave it. He left it and he slammed the door and said this is why I’m slamming the door. Then you also go into what he has done in business in urban communities where we were told you can’t have a movie theater there because it won’t be safe and he’s proven people wrong. Then with the Dodgers and on and on. He’s proven to be so much more than a jock.
Terence Blanchard: You know the other reason I was so excited about doing this documentary is because it wasn’t a tragic story. There’s so many documentaries that you do and they’re beloved figures, but they’re tragic stories and there’s always this backdrop in the music of this dark empathetic kind of feeling. With this it was totally different. It was totally the opposite. One of the things that I loved about the documentary itself: I started to really think about – and hopefully generations to come will really appreciate – is as soon as you see Magic on screen, he looks like a success story. As soon as you see him. It’s not one of these things where this is going to be a dark ride. There are obviously dark moments, and it’s also a triumphant story that still hasn’t been fully told because he’s still doing things. That’s another part of it that made it exciting for me, as an African American man, that we have this African American success story that’s still moving forward.
Awards Daily: Part of succeeding in life is falling down and getting back up. What you get from the series is that he learned from the failures. That’s covered here too.
Terence Blanchard: That’s all part of the reason for doing the show. While the music is grooving it’s supposed to have that thing. I remember talking to the guys when they first asked me to do it. I said there has to be a vibe that captures who Magic was from the beginning of the show. That’s the thing that you experience. He’s from Detroit. He didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he always had a smile on his face. He always was determined. That’s the constant. That groove based music, that’s what that’s supposed to symbolize. It;s supposed to be that constant in his life, that energetic thing that draws people to him. We all remember when that dude first got in the league, that moment when he jumped in Kareem’s arms and Kareem was like yo, man. (Laughs. We all remember that. In essence that’s who he’s always been, that hasn’t changed so the music had to reflect that too.
Awards Daily: I think what’s fascinating about him is you could argue that he “went Hollywood,” but he never forgot where he came from. He never forgot that middle class background and his father working two jobs. His work ethic is extraordinary.
Terence Blanchard:. It’s funny when you say he “went Hollywood.” A lot of times when people are given that moniker, it’s because they’ve forgotten who they were, they’ve drank the coffee and they believe the hype. That was never the case with Magic. It’s hard to say he “went Hollywood.” I think what he has done is expanded what that idea is. He proved that you can be successful, that you can become very famous and still maintain your identity. For me at least, that’s one of the things that I learned about him even back then. It’s funny in the documentary cause it looks so old now, I remember that picture of him sitting on top of that Mercedes. When that happened years ago I was like wow look at that, man. He’s driving a Mercedes. And at the same time you would see what he was doing in his community. You would see when he would go back to Lansing. I really admired that. There are so many people that once they get bitten by that drug of fame, everything changes. Again, that goes back to the whole motion of what I was trying to do with the score, have that constant thing, that groove that’s Magic. Throughout all of the trials and tribulations, everything, the ups and the downs, that was the constant. Even with the relationship with Cookie and what they were going through.
Awards Daily: That’s a huge part of the show throughout is the ups and downs and his inability to commit to Cookie. He doesn’t always look great in the show, but he also owns it, which I think is admirable.
Terence Blanchard: That’s why I wanted to do the documentary. I met Magic a few times – I don’t really know him, but I knew that that was a big part of who he was. One of the things that I think has made him successful is his outlook and how he doesn’t shy away from some of those issues. The whole idea of growth, we all are human and we are on this planet for a short period of time. If you’re lucky, hopefully, forget about money or success, you grow as a person. I think that’s what I love seeing in the documentary. Hopefully the music supported that, because that was definitely my intention to do.
Awards Daily: People don’t necessarily start dying when they get sick or when they get old, they start dying when they stop growing.
Terence Blanchard: When they stop having hope and stop being excited about waking up tomorrow.
Awards Daily: And lose curiosity.
Terence Blanchard: Listen at the way Magic would talk about basketball now. He still has passion. He still gets excited about things. That’s what you want out of life. I worked with this one director and he said something to me that his dad told him, and I said I’m gonna carry that with me for the rest of my days. His dad told him “I don’t care if you go to college, I don’t care what you do, the only thing I care about is that you stay curious.” That to me covers a whole bunch of areas. If you stay curious. That’s what it seems like Magic is about. He’s not about sitting down just resting on the fact that he was Magic Johnson, one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
Awards Daily: And he could do that. It would be easy to do that.
Terence Blanchard: It would be very easy to do that. That’s why I said, the look of the documentary to me from that first shot of him sitting in that chair, if you didn’t know who he was he looks like a successful CEO. My thinking was that’s the beauty of this documentary. How do we celebrate this dude musically while maintaining that constant of who he’s always been which you hope people will start to figure out is part of the reason why he’s so successful.
Awards Daily: It’s the work ethic that was instilled in him as a child that he followed up on and he happens to be a very smart guy which once again goes back to my irritation about how he wasn’t considered a smart basketball player. I’ve never seen anybody so smart on the court.
Terence Blanchard: I know. Like I said, the closest thing that I’ve seen now to that team is the Warriors. One of the things about watching the Warriors play is that they’re just a smart team. That’s what you used to see with the Lakers. I remember playing the Pistons and when the bad boys were getting rough with them, it looked like they were more athletic and you said “what’s gonna happen?” But they just outsmarted them. They played basketball. They didn’t play streetball, they played basketball. Magic was a big part of orchestrating all of that. Hopefully I did him some justice. I wanted to make sure that even though he wasn’t a jazz fan like Kareem, I wanted to bring a certain sophistication to the score.
Awards Daily: When we first spoke for BlacKkKlansman, you had made the music for Malcolm X and all these phenomenal scores, and you had been overlooked for years and years. When we talked about BlacKkKlansman, I was saying this has got to be the year. I remember you saying I’ve been down this road before. (Laughs).They’re not missing you anymore. You’ve had two Oscar nominations and an Emmy nomination now. Your peers and the public have finally gotten to the point where they get what you’re doing musically and it’s being lauded. You probably don’t need the awards and nominations to feel like you have had a successful career, but it doesn’t suck I imagine.
Terence Blanchard: It doesn’t suck. I’m more happy for my supporters than I am for me. There’s so many people…
Awards Daily: Until that BlacKkKlansman nomination came in, I was mad for years! (Laughs)
Terence Blanchard: The thing that’s unusual about it for me is that there’s so many people like you who would be upset, and it didn’t bother me so much because I never intended to have this as a career. I wanted to be the next Miles Davis. Film wasn’t something that I initially sought out. Now being in it and being recognized, of course it’s nice. Anybody that would tell you different would be a fool. I think the other part of it that makes it nice is that there have been so many people campaigning for me over the last few years to make all this happen, because they’ve been determined to make sure that I get recognized and get put on the map, so I’m happy for them as well. Here’s the secret sauce: it never stopped me from working on great projects. That’s where the enjoyment comes in. when you get a chance to work on something that has great acting and has a great look to it and a great story. Those are the moments that you cherish, because they don’t come along all the time. I’ve been blessed in my career to have worked on a number of really great movies. That part is not lost on me. I’m still very grateful just for the opportunities.
