Denzel Washington stood about 20ft high. A frozen image of him as Bleek, from the film Mo' Better Blues, trumpet in hand, was projected across the back of the stage. But for once, people weren't watching the star. They were watching the little guy at the front, the man who really could play the trumpet. The man who gave Bleek his blues.
The Barbican's Only Connect series continued with a celebration of the partnership of director Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard, the musician he has collaborated with since the late 1980s. It is a relationship characterised by Lee's hefty respect for the role of the soundtrack; there cannot be too many directors who give their composers the script as soon as the ink is dry.
Respect felt a bit like reverence at first. Blanchard's band, along with the BBC Concert Orchestra, were backed by stills from nine films. We slowly panned in on each image, enough to give it a trace of life, but not to animate it. It felt like a memorial service, as if we were paying our last respects to images that would never move again - especially as a consistent thread of Blanchard's music is nobility. This freezing was about focusing us on the music, letting the drama be with the musicians.
One still, from Lee's latest film, 25th Hour, showed four actors staring intently off camera. Here, the search for answers turned to the music - a tense, Jaws-like motif, stopping and starting to deny any feeling of security (unintentionally heightened by a pretty shaky-sounding BBCCO). In Summer of Sam, there were unsettling moments when dark climaxes in the music fell in the middle of apparently innocent images; in Clockers, Lynden David Hall poignantly sang People in Search of a Life while guns pointed overhead.
Blanchard's emotional signposts are less glaring when he works with jazz. His orchestrations of songs such as These Three Words and Make Sure You're Sure (sung amazingly by Marsha Ambrosius and Dianne Reeves), and themes from films such as Jim Brown, carried ambiguity: roots coupled with romanticism, desperation with hope, studied intellect with streetwise thinking. Blanchard played powerfully, at pains to give his trumpet a voice: he choked back phrases and let high points die in an emotional gasp, rather than be virtuosically chopped off.
After excerpts from Malcolm X came the only film of the evening, a five-minute eulogy to the black leader. It had moving images, in both senses of the word, but the band was silent. What was lost proved that the show had been worthwhile.
