BLANCHARD TURNS KATRINA INTO MEMORABLE MELODIES.

Byline: FRED SHUSTER

>MUSIC WRITER

Like all New Orleans musicians, Terence Blanchard was uprooted and his life completely disrupted by Hurricane Katrina.

Just before the storm hit, Blanchard moved his wife and daughters to Atlanta and then to an apartment in Los Angeles. For almost two weeks, he lost touch with his mother, who had relocated from her longtime home in the Pontchartrain Park area to Mississippi.

It was around that time Spike Lee enlisted the trumpeter, band leader and composer to write music for his four-hour HBO documentary "When the Levees Broke." Blanchard, who has scored nearly all of Lee's films since 1990's "Mo' Better Blues," went back to New Orleans just months after the hurricane struck, hoping for inspiration. He was stunned speechless.

"All you heard was silence," said Blanchard, who has more than 40 movie and TV scores to his credit. "It was bizarre. In my mother's neighborhood, which was destroyed, all life was gone. I stood in front of her door and didn't hear a single sound -- no birds, no dogs, no bugs, no cars. There were no people around, either."

Eventually, Blanchard did devise a musical concept to describe the awful scenes he witnessed. Expanding on haunting themes he wrote for the 2006 Lee documentary, the 45-year-old trumpeter last month issued "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)," a moving and widely acclaimed set of tracks featuring Blanchard's quintet and the 40-piece Northwest Sinfonia.

Entertainment Weekly said the album conveys "the Katrina story CNN can't tell, masterfully told." The disc, in which each member of Blanchard's band contributed a piece with his own take on the tragedy, will be the centerpiece of Blanchard's dates this week at Catalina's in Hollywood.

"Part of it is a means for me to just purge and deal with it in my own personal way," said Blanchard, who came to prominence as Wynton Marsalis' replacement in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the 1980s. "Part of it is a means for me to help others who haven't been there to experience the pain and frustration that we feel trying to rebuild the city."

Blanchard, who recently completed the score for "Talk to Me," starring Don Cheadle, and is about to start work on music for Lee's next film, "Miracle at St. Anna," about black American soldiers fighting in Italy during the second world war, moved back to New Orleans in early 2006 after repairs were finished on his Garden District home.

"I think we all have an obligation to not let people forget what happened and not to let people forget what's still going on," Blanchard said. "It's about everybody picking up a hammer and a shovel and doing whatever they can to make things better. ... I'm just one person, but if everybody lends a helping hand, like they say, there's power in numbers."

Fred Shuster [phone]

[e-mail]

TERENCE BLANCHARD SEXTET

>Where: Catalina's, 6725 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood.

>When: 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. tonight through Saturday, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Sunday.

>Tickets: $18 to $30.

www.ticketmaster.com.

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Terence Blanchard took inspiration from Katrina's devastation to create music.