Symphony Hall Presents: Miles Davis and John Coltrane Centennial with Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane
Lead Season Sponsor
Sunday, May 24, 2026, 3:00pm
Terence Blanchard, trumpet and synthesizers
Ravi Coltrane, saxophones
E-Collective
Charles Altura, guitar
Tom Oren, piano and keyboards
Alex Smith, bass
Mark Whitfield Jr., drums
Selections to be announced from the stage
There is no intermission in this concert
When can I take photos and videos? You are welcome (and encouraged!) to take photos and videos before and after the concert, and at intermission. Symphony Hall makes for a beautiful backdrop! Photos, videos, and audio recordings are strictly prohibited during the performance. At that time, be a great neighbor to your fellow concertgoers, put your phone or camera away, and enjoy the moment!
Guests are expected to drink responsibly. Intoxication will not be tolerated. Intervention with an impaired guest will be handled in a prompt and safe manner, which may include ejection from the premises.
The Boston Pops welcomes Harvard Outings & Innings; KSP Financial; Winchester High School
Steve Colby, Sound Designer | Pamela Smith, Lighting Designer
The Boston Pops Orchestra may be heard on Boston Pops Recordings, RCA Victor, Sony Classical, and Philips Records.
Steinway & Sons Pianos, selected exclusively for Symphony Hall.
Special thanks to Fidelity Investments, Lead Season Sponsor, and Fairmont Copley Plaza, Official Hotel of the Boston Pops.
New arrangements and works for the Boston Pops are generously supported by the Cecile Higginson Murphy Pops Programming Fund.
Broadcasts of the Boston Pops are heard on 99.5 WCRB.
Programs and artists subject to change.
The BSO’s 2025-26 season is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc.
Board of Trustees | Board of Advisors | Staff and Administration
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![Terence Blanchard headshot]()
Terence Blanchard
Terence Blanchard has been a consistent artistic force in making powerful musical statements about painful American tragedies — past and present. A true "Renaissance man," Blanchard stands tall as one of jazz’s most esteemed trumpeters and defies expectations by pursuing a spectrum of artistic endeavors. Boundary-breaking and genre-defying, Blanchard is globally recognized as a dazzling soloist and a prolific composer for film, television, opera, Broadway, orchestras, and his own ensembles. Leading theater magazine TheaterMania recently described Blanchard as “the most exciting American composer working in opera today.”
An eight-time Grammy winner and two-time Oscar-nominated film composer, Blanchard became only the second African American composer to receive two nominations in the original score category at the 2022 Academy Awards, echoing Quincy Jones’ achievements for In Cold Blood (1967) and The Color Purple (1985). Blanchard’s work has positioned him at the forefront of addressing human rights, civil rights, and racial injustice, including his 2015 album "Breathless," an elegy for Eric Garner, whose final words, "I can’t breathe," became a civil rights rallying cry.
Blanchard is also celebrated as a two-time opera composer. His opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on the memoir by celebrated writer and New York Times columnist Charles Blow, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on September 27, 2021, opening their 2021–22 season. This marked the first opera by an African American composer to premiere at the Met in its 138-year history. The recording of those performances won a Grammy Award for best opera recording, and the New York Times praised Fire as "inspiring," "subtly powerful," and "a bold, affecting adaptation of Charles Blow’s work." Reflecting on this historic moment, Blanchard said, "I don’t want to be a token, but a turnkey." Widely recognized as a significant cultural milestone, Fire returns to the Met for a highly anticipated second run in April 2024.
Blanchard’s first opera, Champion, about the troubled life of boxer Emile Griffith, premiered in 2013 and starred Denyce Graves, with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cristofer. Champion debuted at the Met in April 2023 to widespread critical acclaim and won a 2024 Grammy for best opera recording.
At the core of Blanchard’s expansive career are his beautiful, provocative, and inspiring jazz recordings. In 1994, he told DownBeat Magazine, “Writing for film is fun, but nothing can beat being a jazz musician, playing a club, playing a concert.” This sentiment holds true today.
Blanchard has composed the scores for more than 20 Spike Lee projects over three decades, including When the Levees Broke, BlacKkKlansman, and Da 5 Bloods (both of which earned him Oscar nominations). His other notable work includes Regina King’s One Night in Miami; Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou; George Lucas’ Red Tails; the HBO drama series Perry Mason; Apple TV’s docuseries They Call Me Magic (for which he received an Emmy nomination); and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, starring Viola Davis.
In 2021, Blanchard released "Absence," a collaboration with his longtime E-Collective band and the acclaimed Turtle Island Quartet. The album, recorded in February 2020 just before the COVID-19 lockdowns, was a tribute to Wayne Shorter and earned Grammy nominations for best instrumental jazz album and best improvised jazz solo. Blanchard explained, "I knew Wayne wasn’t feeling well at the time, so I wanted to honor him and let him know how much he has meant to me. When you look at my writing, you can see how much I’ve learned from Wayne. He mastered the art of starting with a simple melody and juxtaposing it against harmonies from a different place to bring it to life in a unique light."
Born in New Orleans in 1962, Blanchard is a musical polymath who launched his solo career as a bandleader in the 1990s. Since then, he has released 20 solo albums, garnered 15 Grammy nominations, composed for the stage and more than 60 films, and received 10 major commissions. Named a 2024 NEA Jazz Master and an inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Blanchard currently serves as the executive artistic director for SFJAZZ, the largest nonprofit jazz presenter in the world.
Reflecting on his commitment to artistic works of conscience, Blanchard shared, "You get to a certain age when you ask, 'Who’s going to stand up and speak out for us?' Then you look around and realize the James Baldwins, Muhammad Alis, and Dr. Kings are no longer here ... and begin to understand that it falls on you. I’m not trying to correct the whole thing; I’m just trying to speak the truth." He cites unimpeachable inspirations: "John Coltrane playing Alabama, Louis Armstrong speaking out about his people, and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who live by their Buddhist philosophy and expand the conscience of their communities. I’m standing on their shoulders. How dare I go through life, having met these men, and not take away any of that? Like anyone else, I’d love to play feel-good party music, but sometimes my music reflects the reality of where we are."
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![Ravi Coltrane headshot]()
Ravi Coltrane
Ravi Coltrane is a critically acclaimed Grammy nominated saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. In the course of a twenty plus year career, Mr. Coltrane has worked as a sideman to many, and recorded noteworthy albums for himself and others.
Ravi has released six albums as a leader. His albums include, “Moving Pictures,” “From The Round Box,” “Mad 6,” “In Flux,” “Blending Times,” and “Spirit Fiction.” He also has collaborated on various albums, including, “Seraphic Light” with Joe Lovano and David Liebman, “In Movement” with Jack DeJohnette and Matthew Garrison, and The Blue Note’s 70th Anniversary recording, “Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note.” Additional credits include performances as well as recordings with Elvin Jones, Terence Blanchard, Kenny Baron, Steve Coleman, McCoy Tyner, Jack DeJohnette, Matt Garrison, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts, Geri Allen, Joanne Brackeem, The Blue Note 7, among others.
Born in Long Island, the second son of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, Ravi was named after Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar. He was raised in Los Angeles where his family moved after his father’s death in 1967. His mother, Alice Coltrane, was a significant influence on Ravi and it was he who encouraged Alice to return to performance and the recording studio after a long absence. Subsequently, Ravi produced and played on Alice Coltrane’s powerful, ‘Translinear Light’, which was released in 2004.
Ravi lives in Brooklyn, NY and maintains a fast paced touring, recording, composing and performance schedule. He leads the effort to restore the John Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, Long Island www.thecoltranehome.org and presides over important reissues of his parent’s recordings.
In Pursuit of Freedom: Miles and Coltrane at 100
by Emmett G. Price III, Ph.D.
“It was Miles who made me want to be a much better musician.”
— John Coltrane“The group I had with Coltrane made me and him a legend.”
— Miles Davis
During the spring of 1959 Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926-September 28, 1991) and John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926-July 17, 1967) revolutionized the genre of jazz, and by extension 20th-century music, with historic recording sessions resulting in the universally acclaimed albums Kind of Blue and Giant Steps. Miles’s trailblazing departure from hard bop into the infinite possibilities of modes influenced global music for decades to come. Featuring Coltrane and an exceptional cast of future legends, the album stands as one of the greatest of all time. Coltrane’s masterpiece, also noted as one of the greatest in history, explored his newly refined concept of melodically flowing through chord progressions with rapid speed and dynamic fluidity in a manner never experienced before. Several sessions for Giant Steps featured members of Davis’s quintet, including “Naima,” Coltrane’s homage to his first wife. Inextricably linked by their brilliance as composers, tenacity as bandleaders, and artistic genius, Miles and Coltrane shared similar visions for the use of Black creative expression as a force to build bridges, empower humanity, and heal. They both believed that freedom was more than a musical principle, but rather a life pursuit.
The America of 1926 that Davis and Coltrane were born into was a nation in crisis—conflicted by the aspirations of democratic ideals while simultaneously plagued with the realities of systemic injustice and concentric inequalities. Sixty-three years after President Abraham Lincoln’s the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people in “the land of the free, home of the brave” were overwhelmed by segregation, poll taxes, housing discrimination, employment inequity, and a barrage of racial violence including lynching.
Yet, the ingenuity, grit and resilience of Black intellects and creatives stimulated a thriving culture that remained focused, determined and sagacious in imagining an antidote to white supremacist ideologies. Leaders such W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, to name a few, instigated spirited dialogues that were captured and acted upon by Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and countless others. Converging on Harlem, a generation of scholar-artist-activists served as catalytic visionaries of a Zeitgeist that looked back to Africa while gazing forward to an existence for Black people where survival was guaranteed and freedom an everyday reality. These architects of the New Negro Renaissance remained confident in an unknown future because they “too, sing America” (to quote Langston Hughes). The life energy of these cultural elders infused the thriving districts of the New York City that welcomed Miles in the mid-1940s and Coltrane in the mid-1950s.
From urban East St. Louis, Illinois, and rural Hamlet, North Carolina, both railroad hubs, Miles and Coltrane respectively found their way to the jazz capital of the world. Davis, the mentor, had a penchant for assembling unique musicians into extraordinary ensembles—as different from one another as pianists Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans or saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane himself. Like Duke Ellington, Davis had the gift of effectively writing specifically for the members of his bands, distinct individual voices whose shared vision expanded beyond jazz and in many ways beyond music. Coltrane, the protégé, absorbed and eventually emerged as a peer. His search for a holistic, mind-body-spirit alignment through sound became an overwhelming theme within a portfolio of creative works that continues to inspire musicians and nonmusicians around the globe. Miles’s and Coltrane’s courage to impart new approaches to human expression and to influence new formulations of human engagement through the music they created has a lasting impact well beyond the limitations of the jazz club bandstand. They were 21st-century sages functioning within the 20th century, leaving breadcrumbs for a trail of boundless opportunities we still follow.
With this afternoon’s concert, the Boston Pops continues a rich jazz tradition established in the 1920s, codified in the 1930s by the great maestro Arthur Fiedler. Fiedler programmed Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” already in 1938 and famously invited Duke to Tanglewood in 1965. Blurring the boundaries and borders of soundscapes, venue and audience, Fiedler (like Duke) believed that all Americans should benefit from and have access to all American music. As we celebrate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, who better to signify the American spirit of individuality and independence than Davis and Coltrane?
This program was envisioned, curated, and interpreted by two sons of the music, 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Terence Blanchard and internationally acclaimed saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana, Blanchard is an eight-time Grammy winner and two-time Oscar nominee, a force of nature as a composer for television, film, and opera as well as a celebrated bandleader and educator. Coltrane, the second son of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, is a Grammy-nominated composer, bandleader, and record executive. Together, they serve as ambassadors of freedom in a world and nation that need to be reminded of the power of Black creative expression to offer a vision of peace, healing and enduring hope. In the America of 2026 as we reflect on 250 years of unreconciled history, the aligning of the centennial of the birth of Miles Davis and John Coltrane is perhaps more important than imagined.
Emmett G. Price III, Ph.D. is founding Dean of Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee. He is a Trustee of the Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston and Chair of the Board of the Trustees for the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.
Quote sources
Valerie Wilmer, “Conversation with Coltrane” in Porter, Lewis, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews. Chicago, IL.: Chicago Review Press, 2010: 117.
Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989: 197.
Boston Pops Major Corporate Sponsors, 2025-26 Season
The Boston Pops and Symphony Hall major corporate sponsorships reflect the increasing importance of alliance between business and the arts. The Boston Pops is honored to be associated with the following companies and gratefully acknowledges their partnership. For information regarding BSO, Boston Pops, and/or Tanglewood sponsorship opportunities, contact Joan Jolley, Director of Corporate Partnerships, at (617) 638-9279 or jjolley@bso.org.