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The LIVE tour marked the first significant collaboration between composer and musician Terence Blanchard and visual artist Andrew F. Scott. Presented in 2018 at UC Davis’ Mondavi Center, the SFJAZZ Center, CSUN’s Soraya Performing Arts Center, and the University of Denver’s Newman Center, this project fused live jazz performance with responsive visual elements to confront the realities of gun violence in contemporary America.

Conceived in the aftermath of Blanchard’s 2015 album, Breathless, a sonic memorial to Eric Garner, the LIVE tour was more than a concert; it was a mobile platform for cultural protest and communal reflection. The album, recorded in cities marred by acts of racialized violence (Dallas, St. Paul, and Cleveland), served as the emotional and political foundation for each performance. In these charged spaces, the music evoked memories and loss; it named names, posed questions, and shaped unresolved grief.

Scott’s visual production extended this ethos into the architecture of each venue. Using sculptural forms, projection mapping, and live video feeds directed by Matt Unkenholz, Scott transformed the stage into a responsive field of light and motion. Visuals were not simply illustrative but interpretive, evoking landscapes marked by trauma, environments that breathed and responded to the ensemble’s sonic momentum. His designs moved between abstraction and figuration, allowing audiences to enter a contemplative space that mirrored the emotional arc of the music.

Each performance was shaped by a rotating cast of musicians from Blanchard’s E-Collective, Taylor Eigsti and Gerald Clayton on piano, Charles Altura on guitar, David Ginyard on bass, and Oscar Seaton on drums, who brought urgency and improvisational precision to the compositions. Together with Scott’s visuals, the ensemble crafted immersive experiences that defied disciplinary boundaries. At The Soraya, the work was reimagined in an intimate “jazz club” format, drawing the audience into proximity with the performers and emphasizing the immediacy of the themes at hand.

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The LIVE tour solidified Blanchard and Scott’s collaborative language, a language built on improvisational responsiveness, abstraction, and direct engagement with social realities. The project redefined what a jazz concert could be: a site of virtuosity and a space of public reckoning. Through this fusion of sound and image, LIVE established a framework for their future work, where performance becomes both a memorial and an act of resistance.