The Grammy Award winner Terence Blanchard is the musician who in the 1980s played the trumpet for bands led by jazz luminaries Lionel Hampton and Art Blakey.

Blanchard also wrote music scores for films such as Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991), Clockers (1995), 4 Little Girls (1997), 25th Hour (2003), and the highly acclaimed Malcolm X (1992).

In terms of his lyrical lines, they have never been in a sense more simple or more sophisticated (check out the blissed-out harmonics in "Innocence"), where the individual players become identified by their ensemble contributions first and then as soloists.

On Bounce, Blanchard proves that he is the trumpet player, composer, and bandleader who is moving jazz, albeit at his own pace, in new directions that encompass both a new look at Western musical systems and never leave the human heart out of the equation.

Whether he’s firing off searing notes that seem to scrap the clouds, as on “On the Verge,” “Azania” or “Fred Brown,” or lowering the flames to candlelight flicker as on “Nocturna,” his solos gleam with clarity, emotional poignancy and rhythmic punch.