NEW YORK (AP)— With more than 40 movie and television scores to his credit, Terence Blanchard is adept at composing the right music to fit a particular scene.

But when the noted jazz trumpeter returned to New Orleans for the first time after Hurricane Katrina, he couldn't imagine any music that would express the overwhelming devastation. In the most musical of American cities, he only heard the sounds of silence.

Just before the hurricane struck, Blanchard evacuated his wife and daughters to Atlanta, and then to his apartment in Los Angeles. He lost contact for nearly two weeks with his mother who had left for Mississippi, but she eventually joined him in Los Angeles while he completed the score for Spike Lee's "Inside Man".

But Blanchard, who has written the music for nearly all of Lee's films since 1990's "Mo' Better Blues," returned to New Orleans in December 2005 when the director enlisted him to write the music for his HBO documentary "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts."

Blanchard found himself in an unaccustomed role in front of the camera when his mother, Wilhelmina, agreed to let Lee film her as she made her initial visit to survey the wreckage to her home in the Pontchartrain Park neighbourhood.

In one of the four-hour documentary's most moving scenes, Blanchard is seen gently consoling his weeping mother by telling her: "This is all stuff that can be rebuilt."

But standing amid the debris in her damp living room, she responds despairingly, "Lord have mercy ... that's easier said than done."

"When I first tried to hear music for this particular story, I heard nothing because that was the dominant feeling I had when I went to my mother's house.

"There was no life in that neighbourhood, and I'll never forget that," said Blanchard, in a telephone interview from his home in New Orleans' Garden District. "I stood in front of her door and I didn't hear a bird chirp, no dogs barking, no insects buzzing around, no cars moving. There were no people in the area.

"And that was a bizarre feeling to have in that neighbourhood which was so full of life," he recalled. "There was no music, man. My first reaction was how do you even put this into a musical context?"

But as Blanchard began sifting through the many visual images and interviews gathered by Lee, some musical themes began to take shape, which he used for his evocative and haunting score for the 2006 documentary.

Blanchard then decided he needed to expand on the score to make his own cathartic statement about Katrina.

He felt the need to work with "a bigger palette of colours" by using a full orchestra.

In August, shortly before Katrina's second anniversary, the 45-year-old Blanchard released the 13-track CD, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)," featuring his regular quintet and the 40-piece Northwest Sinfonia, in which he applies all his storytelling skills by combining cinematic orchestral composition, jazz improvisation and virtuosic trumpet playing.

"Part of it is a means for me to just purge and deal with it in my own personal way," said Blanchard. "Part of it is a means for me to help others who haven't been here to experience the pain and frustration that we all feel being here trying to rebuild this city."

Blanchard, who first rose to prominence when he replaced Wynton Marsalis in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the 1980s, will be giving his first live performance of "Requiem" at this month's Monterey Jazz Festival, where he is the artist-in-residence. In November, he will perform the work at New Orleans' Dixon Hall with the Louisiana Philharmonic

In the opening track, "Ghost of Congo Square," with its drumbeats evoking the New Orleans square considered the birthplace of jazz where slaves gathered to perform their otherwise-forbidden African songs and dances — Blanchard and his bandmates repeatedly chant: "This is a tale of God's will."

"I grew up in the church here and in times like this you have to look for the higher meaning in anything that occurred. If you believe in some higher being, then you have to believe that there are reasons for these things occurring and there are lessons to be drawn," he said.

"Congo Square" is one of three brief improvised "ghost" tunes that serve as transitional interludes.

Blanchard says the trumpet-bass duet "Ghost of Betsy" and tenor sax-drums duet "Ghost of 1927" represent the unheeded warnings from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and Hurricane Betsy in 1965 that hit New Orleans.

Each member of Blanchard's stellar quintet — pianist Aaron Parks, saxophonist Brice Winston, bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Kendrick Scott — contributed a piece with their own reflection on the tragedy.

These include Scott's reflective "Mantra," a musical prayer for healing and renewal, and Parks' lyrical "Ashe" (from a Yoruban word meaning "amen") that sets a more optimistic tone.

"Requiem" prominently features rearranged versions of four themes Blanchard used in his documentary score: "Levees," "Wading Through," "The Water" and "Funeral Dirge."

"Levees" starts with a soft string arrangement indicating the calm before the storm, builds a sense of impending menace, and ends with Blanchard's wailing trumpet sounding the cries of people pleading for help from their rooftops.

"Wading Through," on which pianist Park plays a repeated melodic fragment against the orchestral backdrop, reflects Blanchard's terrifying childhood memories of wading through the waters to reach safety during Hurricane Betsy.

Blanchard said "Funeral Dirge," which begins with Scott playing a slow marching-band snare drum figure, is about all the dead bodies shown in television footage in neighbourhoods he grew up in. "I felt those people ... deserved a proper burial."

Blanchard made a concerted effort to keep his emotions in check while recording the album because the music kept stirring up memories of the stories he had heard.

For one example, a neighbourhood man known as Big Truck who swam from rooftop to rooftop to rescue people, until he drowned in the muddy waters

"Those are the images that I think about ... every time I hear this music because you just want to scream what the hell happened, and somebody needs to be responsible. ... I was angry every time we would play a track and my eyes would well up"

Blanchard recalls the feelings of disbelief that turned into a sense of helplessness and mounting outrage as he observed the inept government response to Katrina.

"You have this notion that in a time of crisis you're going to be taken care of because this is the United States of America," said Blanchard. "It made me question why am I trying to be productive in American society.

"If people in my community can't even get basic services in terms of being rescued or having the levees fortified so they won't be breached? ... I think Katrina ... should prove to Americans that our political system is a sham."

But Blanchard remains proud of his hometown's residents who are trying to rebuild, and is determined to do his part.

Blanchard, who recently completed the score for "Talk to Me," starring Don Cheadle, and is beginning work on music for Lee's next film, "Miracle at St. Anna," about black American soldiers fighting in Italy in the Second World War, could have stayed in Los Angeles.

But in February 2006 he moved his family back to New Orleans after repairs were completed on his Garden District home. In August, he welcomed students of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a graduate-level education program, to their new home at Loyola University in New Orleans.

As its artistic director, Blanchard helped arrange the Institute's relocation to jazz's birthplace after eight years at the University of Southern California, despite offers from several prestigious Ivy League schools.

"I look at it as a win-win situation for everyone involved," added Blanchard, who says the student musicians can benefit from close proximity to New Orleans's rich musical tradition while also conducting outreach programs at local high schools and colleges.

Blanchard chose to close "Requiem for Katrina" with his composition "Dear Mom," a tender heartfelt ballad paying tribute to the bravery of his mother in opening up her home to the cameras.

"I was really proud of my mom because that was a hard thing to do ... to take a very private moment and make it extremely public," he said. "That piece was just a means to express musically what words just couldn't say to my mom."

Blanchard has made good on his promise to help his 76-year-old mother rebuild her home, which she expects to move into later this month even though her neighbourhood remains sparsely populated.

"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," said Blanchard, who will be playing music from "Requiem" wherever his quintet performs.

"It's about everybody picking up a hammer and a shovel and doing whatever they can to make things better."

"This is what I do for a living, it's just one CD and I'm just one person, but if everybody lends a helping hand, like they say there's power in numbers."

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