Flow

Terence Blanchard | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 7, 2005)
• Original Release Date: 2005
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Blue Note Records
• ASIN: B0009IFEQ8
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  DVD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #100,661 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Flow is trumpet player Terence Blanchard's second album for Blue Note. Over the years Blue Note's recorded some of the best trumpeters the world has ever known; from Miles Davis and Lee Morgan to Freddie Hubbard and Don Cherry. Terence Blanchard manages to successfully draw on the label's rich history, moving with ease from a ballad like "Over There" to the organic build and insistent propulsion of the album's longest track, "Harvesting Dance." He embraces melodic precision, but always in accord with a resonant emotional foundation. Producer Herbie Hancock is a perfect fit for this project, bridging the traditional realms of post-bop and modernist inclinations. --David Greenberger

Product Description

Produced by the artist and four-time Grammy winner Herbie Hancock, Flow heralds nothing less than the brilliant second act of Blanchard's already extraordinary career. Flow is TB's rambunctiously heated answer to those unenlightened few who doubted that this chill master of the urbane film score (Mo' Better Blues, Malcolm X, Barbershop) could get down. Indeed, Flow not only showcases Blanchard's prodigious instrumental and composing skills; it reveals him to be both a shrewd judge of young talent and a bandleader of Milesian dimension and magnitude as well.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major statement from Terence Blanchard, June 11, 2005

By 

Jan P. Dennis "Longboard jazzer" (Monument, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flow (Audio CD)

His last disc, Bounce, was pretty amazing, but this one casually trumps it. It's almost as if, having established a loose-limbed world-jazz esthetic, Terence Blanchard has discovered how to move within that sensibility with complete freedom yet with a rigor seldom encountered in the wild and wooly world of post-bop, free-jazz, world-music.

A tip-off is the inclusion of Herbie Hancock as producer (who also guests on piano on two numbers). Hancock has found a way to situate this music squarely within the latest world-jazz aesthetic, yet make it entirely accessible to even the neophyte jazz listener--all, amazingly, without compromising either its jazz bona fides or its commercial appeal.

My contention has always been that transcendent world-jazz, such as purveyed on this magical disc, is some of the finest musics available on the planet. One thinks of the magical music of Omar Sosa, the pioneering work of Egberto Gismonti, the huge statements of late period Yousef Lateef, the mysterioso contributions of Dhaffer Youssef. With this latest release, certainly the finest ever from Terence Blanchard, the march of marvelously mesmeric world-jazz advances to new plateaux.

One of the reasons is the earthereal contribution of Lionel Louke, primarily on acoustic guitar, but occasionally on electric. Aaron Parks on piano also marks a significant advance over his estimable contributions to last year's Bounce. And if he's some marginally upstaged by Herbie's mesmeric contributions, that's nothing to be ashamed about; after all, we're talking about one of the prime keyboard innovators in recent jazz memory.

This is music of the absolute highest accomplishment. I can hardly wait for the next installment from the amazing Terence Blanchard.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flow doesn't, September 18, 2005

By 

M. Murphy (birmingham, alabama United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flow (Audio CD)

As a huge fan of Mr.Blanchard and a lover of his previous Bluenote cd "Bounce" I was anxiously awaiting his follow up "Flow". Unfortunately "Flow" doesn't. While Blanchard is a wonderful composer[Spike Lee's films] most of the tunes on Flow come from bandmates who clearly do not have Terance's compositional skills. The weakest ones seem to be 3 tunes by the guitar player which represents 22 minutes of the cd. In addition Blanchard's 3 versions of the song "Flow" are guitar heavy and could have used Herbie Hancock[the producer]on a different chordal instrument[piano]. The supporting players are all different from his previous cd[Bounce] save the great sax player and Blanchard bud Brice Winston. Flow is a move in a more electronic direction for Blanchard. It's a move that fellow young trumpet players like Nicholas Payton[Sonic Trance} and Roy Hargrove[RH Factor] have made with varying sucess. While Payton and Hargrove have great chops neither one of them is the composer that Blanchard is. Here's hoping Terrance goes back to doing what he does as well as anyone composing and playing interesting accoustic jazz. Better Blanchard choices along with "Bounce" are "Jazz In Film" "Wandering Moon" and "The Heart Speaks". Flows meanders in mediocrity unfortunately.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NOMINATED FOR 2007 GRAMMY, BEST LONGFORM MUSIC VIDEO, February 6, 2007

By 

Jim Gabour (New Orleans) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Terence Blanchard: Flow - Living in the Stream of Music (DVD)

This is Terence's own film about the creative process. It is not a concert film, but a powerful examination of a life in music.

"Everyone experiences flow from time to time and will recognize its characteristics: People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence. All of these optimal experiences add up to mastery, or better yet, a sense of participation in life, thus the meaning of life."
-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
New York: Harper & Row, 1990

For a musician like Terence Blanchard, flow is about finding the moment when the struggle finally seems worthwhile, when all the years of study and work make sense. At the start of filming, Terence happily speculated that he may have finally assembled the perfect creative unit, a band that grows individually, and simultaneously as a group: "With this band, I just feel born-again! [laughs] It's given me new life, piqued my curiosity, made me work hard again to really try to redefine myself, to develop and just be an artist. At the same time, I'm really having so much fun..."
In the course of Flow's visual collage of narrative, travelogue, and tunes -- filmed on four continents -- Blanchard, chillmaster of the urban film score (Mo' Better Blues, Malcolm X, Barbershop, She Hate Me, The 25th Hour) and his young, incredibly innovative band nightly pushed the edges, inventing new music that touched the souls of audiences from Paris to New Orleans, at a huge venue in Tokyo and an intimate club in Osaka, and from the street scene of South Africa to the swimming-pool-studded canyons of Hollywood. But the exotic settings serve to frame the human background of the very real daily lives of six musicians, constantly on the move physically and creatively.
The film aims at not only showcasing Blanchard's prodigious instrumental and composing skills, but at revealing him as both a shrewd judge of young talent and... an old-world Master Artist of dimension and magnitude as well. He works intimately developing his band's individual potentials on the road, but takes one week each month to return to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz to teach even younger musicians. Terence is committed to teaching, and the process of a life education in music is at the heart of Flow.
And then, allowing the public to see the other half of his musical life for the very first time, he leads audiences into the famed ToddAO recording studio in Los Angeles, offering the opportunity to watch over his shoulder as he creates the soundtrack for Spike Lee's Inside Man (Universal Pictures/Imagine Entertainment), starring Denzel Washington, for early 2006 release.
Every aspect of the joy, and the pain, of their art is on display as Terence and band travel the world riding the effortless, unselfconscious flow of musicians performing at the peak of their abilities. "The overriding goal in what we do," says Blanchard, "is to stop being musicians, and start being the music."
Tour films may be a cliché, but Flow quickly became an unique document of a newly-dawning era of artistic commitment in contemporary music. The camera unobtrusively recorded the personal evolution of the musicians as they individually dealt with both the rigors and the excitement of the road, and then each night climbed on stage for an even larger musical adventure.
Dozens of musicians, dozens of locales, dozens of tunes, and joy, spread out over ninety minutes: it's all a part of going with the Flow.