Terri Lyne Carrington

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Terri Lyne Carrington is one of the most respected jazz musicians in the world. Her drumming career started at the age of 10, which is when she officially got her musicians’ union card, and in the decades since, she’s earned countless accolades, including four Grammys, a Doris Duke Artist Award and a NEW Jazz Masters Fellowship. She has performed on over 100 recordings and has toured and recorded with jazz legends, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz and Esperanza Spalding. 

In recent years she has turned her attention to correcting gender inequities in her field. In 2018 she founded the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at her alma mater, Berklee School of Music in Boston. She remains the Institute’s artistic director, ensuring that new generations of female, trans and non-binary musicians are welcomed to contribute their talents to the genre. 

She’s also passionate about recognizing the contributions women have already made to jazz. To wit, she edited a recently published collection of music titled “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.” Alongside that project, she recorded an album titled “New Standards, Vol. 1” that features several compositions in the book. “New Standards” won Terri Lyne her most recent Grammy, and not surprisingly she plans eventually to record all 101 compositions.

Terri Lyne also recently curated a multi-artist multimedia installation titled “New Standards” that initially opened at the Carr Center in Detroit, where she is artistic director. This interview took place the morning after the closing party celebrating the exhibition of “New Standards” at Emerson Gallery of Contemporary Arts in Boston.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• By the time you created the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, you were already hugely successful. What made you want to create the organization at that point in your career? Was there an instigating moment?
• What you mean when you say, “The extra labor that a woman musician has to do?” What is that extra labor?
• What do you tell a musician who perhaps has your talent but just does not know how to take up the space that you’ve learned to take up?
• You heard from the other two women in your trio about what it felt like to be performing in an all-female ensemble. Did it feel different for you?
• Has your own musicmaking changed since you really started tackling this issue of gender inequity in the genre?
• What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?
• You said you’re interested in “not just gender alternatives to the jazz canon but also stylistic alternatives so that some of the modern approaches to composing can eventually be considered standard too.” What you mean by “modern approaches to composing”?
• How big an umbrella can jazz be? Is there a point when it stops being jazz, or can jazz start incorporating a lot of different genres too?
• Are you facing any resistance from the jazz establishment, if there is such a thing, for the work that you’re doing?
• Last fall you premiered part one of a multimedia installation “Shifting The Narrative: Jazz and Gender Justice.” How did the idea for the installation evolve, and how did you want it to work in concert with your album?
• Is there kind of a no-brainer way that the world of jazz or the music business could be changed so that women could feel more welcomed?

Pier Carlo Talenti: By the time you created the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, you were already hugely successful and could have just rested on your laurels. What made you want to create the organization at that point in your career? Was there an instigating moment?

Terri Lyne Carrington: I had spoken to some young women at Berklee that were telling me their stories, and I felt like I hadn’t done enough to support people coming behind me, women especially, playing this music. And I felt like now or never, basically.

I felt that I had been so concerned with furthering my career and all the work that it takes for anybody to be successful playing jazz. Especially for women to be successful, there’s definitely extra labor involved, so as you’re doing that for yourself, it’s easy to not necessarily think about other people. I realized I was at a place in my career where I could absolutely think about others and work more toward equity in the field.

Pier Carlo: I don’t want to assume I know what you mean when you say, “The extra labor that a woman musician has to do.” Could you say more about that? What is that extra labor?

Terri Lyne: With any minority group, marginalized communities, there’s extra labor. The saying goes, “You have to be twice as good to get half as much.” That’s an expression in the Black community. [She chuckles.] Most people think the numbers are more than that, the percentages are more than that, and it’s different but the same in other marginalized communities.

For instance, when I had a trio with Esperanza Spalding and Geri Allen, they both talked about how they felt different and more at ease playing in this configuration because there wasn’t as much chatter going on in their heads. There weren’t the thoughts about, “Oh, this person, is he hitting on me?” or “Does he really like the way I play? Did I get hired because of the look? Do they think I’m as good as the next guy?” All those questions and all those things that men don’t have to deal with. 

That’s generally what happens in any minority group. You have extra things to think about, extra burdens. And then expectations. Just as a woman in society, there’s extra burdens there. You’re expected to raise children and to clean the house and all these other things on top of that. You can’t just go off and be a genius with a lot of support and just be off in a corner doing that. There are so many other things that you’re accountable for.

Pier Carlo: You yourself have talked about how in a sense you had a leg up in that your father was a musician who was widely respected. But you also had remarkable strength of character. Before I ask you the next question, you’ve got to tell your Buddy Rich story because it’s too good not to hear it.

Terri Lyne: [She laughs.] My dad knew so many people. I would say he knew everybody in jazz at that time period. It was really true. There were far more people that he knew than he didn’t know in the business. Those kinds of relationships were very helpful to my career, and I realized that most people, whether male or female, did not have that kind of access. I say he gave me both a literal and figurative access to the jazz stage, so that was a great advantage for me. But I also, of course, had to have enough talent to deliver something. If you have opportunity, you have to have something to back it up.

My first professional gig was when I was 10 years old and Clark Terry brought me as a guest to Wichita, KS, to the festival there. He had what he called his East-Coast West-Coast Jazz Giants with Jimmy Rowles, George Duvivier, Al Cohn, Garnett Brown, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Louie Bellson and Clark. And Dianne Reeves and I were his guests.

Buddy Rich was also playing on that festival, and I wanted to meet him. People said, “He’s in a bad mood. Stay away from him.” But he was kind of in walking distance; I could see him. So I went over to him anyway, and somebody introduced me, saying, “Yeah, she’s here as a guest, playing drums with Clark Terry.” He said, “Oh yeah? Well, you better not be any good.” And I said, “Well, who’s going to stop me?” And then he looked at me and said, “Hey, kid, you want to come play with my band?”

Pier Carlo: So I think it’s fair to say you had at a very young age a strength of character that many people may not have developed by then. So I’m curious, especially given what you said about listening to these stories from female musicians that made you want to create the Institute, what do you tell a musician who perhaps has your talent but just does not know how to take up the space that you’ve learned to take up? Do you know what I’m asking?

Terri Lyne: Absolutely. And the issue really is I shouldn’t have to tell them anything because that’s one of the extra burdens that they should not have to carry: what kind of woman to be. Because with women, there’s a balancing act. You have to fit in. You kind of have to be one of the boys, but not exactly. And I think that there’s a lot of figuring out and work that goes into that. I know people that have changed their identities because it wasn’t fun to be a woman trying to play jazz in high school. You didn’t fit in, you didn’t get any solos, you didn’t get support. People have changed their identities to be transgendered male. 

It’s really interesting that it’s been such a boys’ club for so long, because people aren’t thinking about, how has that affected the music? Because you’re getting this perspective, and it’s kind of one-sided. What would a different perspective, a different set of experiences really be if it were ingrained in the music? What would it have sounded like if it had been ingrained from the beginning?

I used to teach in a way of saying, “Yeah, just be better. Just play louder, just play stronger, just fit in. Just match them.” And then I realized that that was the wrong approach because everybody’s not the same. It just so happened that I was that way, but we should not expect every woman to be that way. Or every man, because honestly there are a lot of men that reject that as well and they’re kind of forced into a certain kind of performative masculinity that’s not fair to them either.

Pier Carlo: You heard from the other two women in your trio about what it felt like to be performing in an all-female ensemble. Did it feel different for you?

Terri Lyne: Not really, because I didn’t carry the same burdens that they did. I wasn’t thinking about those things, at least consciously. I think I realized later that I was and I do but not as overtly and not as consciously. It was more kind of, I guess, something that I would push away because it didn’t serve me. So that chatter, I was able to just shrug it off and move to something that helped me move forward, and I looked at anything like that as something that kept me back.

But all I’m saying is that’s where equity and fairness comes in, because men don’t have to deal with that in the same way.

Pier Carlo: Has your own musicmaking changed since you really started tackling this issue of gender inequity in the genre?

Terri Lyne: My own musicmaking? I’m not sure the making of it has changed very much, other than I try to think about some gender balance with who I hire and if I’m curating things. But my own creativity has not changed very much.

I’m probably still trying to figure out what parts of me I’ve squashed along the way. Maybe there’s something else there that I haven’t tapped into, but I haven’t had a lot of time to really even think about that.

Pier Carlo: There’s a question that’s at the heart of the Institute and so much of your work and research: “What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?” The Institute is five years old now, and you’ve made a lot of jazz with many other women musicians in recent years. Do you have a better sense of how you’d answer that question yourself? What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?

Terri Lyne: The question is really to be provocative and it’s for the imagination because we don’t know since it hasn’t happened. I would never try to predict the future. I don’t know what it will sound like exactly. I do know that we all have to expand in our thinking and expand in our hearing, expand in what we consider good jazz to be.

For instance, I had a student who was always a really fine drummer, but I was always thinking, “Yeah, I wish she would just dig in a little more. I wish she would just be a little more aggressive. I wish she would do this or that.” Those were the qualities and the things that I gravitated to from drumming, and luckily I didn’t really say those things too much to her.

I heard a recording of her recently, and I realized that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way she plays. That was me coming from more, as I said before, performative masculinity or hyper-masculinity in what I consider good jazz to be. Once I realized there’s really nothing wrong with the way she plays, that was a pivotal moment for me because I felt that there was some expansion in my listening, in my thinking.

Pier Carlo: It makes me think that good mentorship is so similar to good parenting in the sense that the aim is not to create a mini version of yourself.

Terri Lyne: Exactly, exactly.

Pier Carlo: You’ve also created several projects that call attention to the overlooked contribution of women in jazz. In one interview, you said you’re interested in “not just gender alternatives to the jazz canon but also stylistic alternatives so that some of the modern approaches to composing can eventually be considered standard too.” Can you give me examples of what you mean by “modern approaches to composing”?

Terri Lyne: Well, in the book, “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women Composers,” for instance, we have a graphic score by Jaimie Branch, and I’ve not seen graphic scores.

Pier Carlo: I can’t even picture it. Could you describe that?

Terri Lyne: Oh, a graphic score?

Pier Carlo: Yeah.

Terri Lyne: There are various approaches to how to do it. Some are pictures; some are on staff paper, and some are not. Some could be on staff paper, but without the traditional notes, with arrows and lines and things like that. Jaimie’s is in the book. How do I describe it? It’s directions. It’s really beautiful, the way it’s written and drawn, and it creates its own vibe just looking at it. But then there are directions, some written notes or some directions as far as notes and keys and rhythms, but not on staff paper. Some are just beautiful drawings that you’re interpreting in different ways, however the directions tell you to. So anyway, that’s one thing. 

And there’s a song written by Marilyn Crispell called “Rounds,” and it doesn’t have any bar lines, so there’s another way of approaching it because you’re telling the person that there’s no meter in the sense of how you normally look at meter. 

Those are things that you just don’t generally find and definitely didn’t find in “The Real Book.”

Pier Carlo: How big an umbrella can jazz be, do you think? Is there a point when it stops being jazz, or can jazz start incorporating a lot of different genres too?

Terri Lyne: Well, jazz has been incorporating a lot of different genres. That’s really the beauty about the jazz of today. It is not just one thing. People may call something jazz-adjacent or jazz-inflected or jazz-influenced, but people who come from the tradition, who know the history and have studied the tradition in a certain way and who then choose to put their other musical influences, I think it’s incredibly fair to still call it jazz. It doesn’t have to have a certain swing rhythm or a certain obvious be-bop vocabulary. There’s still a tradition in how the music was created. I think that that’s the jazz of the future. The jazz of today and the jazz of the future is blending all these things.

People may call something jazz-adjacent or jazz-inflected or jazz-influenced, but people who come from the tradition, who know the history and have studied the tradition in a certain way and who then choose to put their other musical influences, I think it’s incredibly fair to still call it jazz.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with more pure forms of jazz and traditional jazz, and there are people that have dedicated their lives to doing that, and I completely respect that. But I think we have to make space for where it’s going and what’s happening today and what their experiences are. So you have jazz that’s mixed with hip hop, jazz that’s mixed with r&b, jazz that’s mixed with indie rock, jazz that’s mixed with classical music. And of course you have Latin jazz and all the other cultural influences that people bring to their forms of jazz.

Pier Carlo: Are you facing any resistance from the jazz establishment, if there is such a thing, for the work that you’re doing?

Terri Lyne: [Chuckling] The jazz mafia. I’m sure there’s resistance, more than I know, because people aren’t coming up to me, outwardly resisting. I’m sure there’s more than I’m actually seeing. People that are resistant to change, that’s kind of normal.

But I think most jazz musicians I know would like to think of themselves as being progressive. When you’re faced with progressive thinking, you have a choice to try to embrace it or to resist. Maybe I’m just being optimistic or naive, but I think there’s more embracing than there is resistance, at least outwardly.

Pier Carlo: I want to talk about your curatorial practice. Last fall at the Carr Center, where you’re the artistic director, you premiered part one of a planned four-part multimedia installation, the title of which is “Shifting The Narrative: Jazz and Gender Justice.” The first part was titled, like your latest album, “New Standards.” How did the idea for the installation evolve, and how did you want it to work in concert with your album?

Terri Lyne: I keep talking about expansion, and I realized that you can bring people to subject matters in different ways. You can do an interview or a podcast and talk about it; you can make an album and give some examples; and you can make a book and say, “Here’s a way to try this yourself.” I’m constantly looking for these various ways to bring people to this topic, to this subject matter, so the idea of a multidisciplinary approach made sense. 

This exhibit is looking at this topic through the visual arts and through film as well as the music itself. We did it at the Carr Center in October, and it actually just closed last night in Boston, which was the second outing of this. We just had a three-and-a-half-week run at Emerson College Media Art Gallery. It’s interesting because every space is different, so it’s going to be different wherever it is, which is another way of being creative, figuring out what works in different spaces. 

One of the ideas for this installation was to show multidirectional, multidimensional artists. The vocalist Carmen Lundy has two amazing sculptures in this installation, and Cécile McLorin Salvant has three pieces, three drawings, that she did. She’s an amazing visual artist. I asked Jazzmeia Horn to reimagine Ella Fitzgerald, as far as her clothing and her style, so she made a dress for Ella. I have a couple of pieces in there as well. And then there’s visual artists that looked at the theme and did work around the theme. 

The foundation of the four sections you’re talking about are films. For “New Standards,” Michael Goldman and myself did a film basically documenting the book, the album and just the need for setting new standards. I asked the iconic artist Carrie Mae Weems, who’s a photographer and thought leader, to look at the theme and to do a film. She was commissioned by the Carr Center to do that, and then she chose to do it on me! I was asking her to cast a wide net of just the theme in general, but she said, “You’re doing so much all the time for other people and exposing and supporting others. I would like to do something on you.” So she did a film on me called “The Road to Carrington.” She has all this old footage and testimonials and poetry and things that she wrote, and it’s a very personal, very nice and very beautiful tribute. That was part of the section that we were calling “The Female and Non-Binary Gaze.”

And there’s a section called “Invisible Labor,” on which I collaborated with another visual artist, Mickalene Thomas. I wrote a piece called “Seen Unseen” that speaks to Black women, the journey and the fact that we can be seen in so many ways but how our humanity is often unseen. This is an extended composition that has been played now twice by full orchestras, but also there’s a scaled down version that’s played by 15 people. We have footage of a performance at SF Jazz where Mickalene VJs. She has a library of video and of stills that she projects while the music is playing. We made a film about that and about the theme of being seen and unseen, and it’s the anchor for “Invisible Labor.”

Then the other section is Mary Lou Williams and Geri Allen in conversation. I wrote a script about an imagined conversation with these two iconic women, and Anna Deavere Smith is going to work with me on bringing this to film. Right now it exists as audio. I had two actors act it out, and so in the installation, you can hear it and see footage of Geri and Mary, but we will eventually make that a film too.

Pier Carlo: That’s amazing. Have you cultivated these other artistic talents all along, or is this more recent?

Terri Lyne: [She laughs.] I don’t exactly know how to answer that because I’m constantly cultivating things. I write, so that’s the first thing. If I write songs, I’m looking at language. And one of the other things in this installation is a book, a children’s book called “Three of a Kind” that I wrote on the forming of The ACS Trio, which is The Allen, Carrington, Spalding Trio. The point of this children’s book is to inspire young girls to play instruments and dream big.

Because I write songs, it wasn’t so farfetched for me to write a children’s book. Especially during the pandemic, I seemed to do a lot of writing, forwards to other people’s books, liner notes for albums, all kinds of things. So for me, understanding Geri Allen and having an understanding for Mary Lou Williams, it wasn’t so difficult for me to write a script about a conversation with them.

Pier Carlo: You’re already in your way changing several systems to make it easier for female and non-binary artists to thrive in jazz. But is there kind of a no-brainer way that the world of jazz or the music business could be changed so that women could feel more welcomed?

Terri Lyne: Well, sure! It’s the same no-brainer way that it could happen in society in general. People have to have more empathy and have less desire for power, greed, all of those things we have to address within ourselves. And when we can have a human revolution within ourselves, then that’s when society changes, that’s when the world changes, that’s when jazz will change.

People ask me, “What can I do?” That question came up a lot during the aftermath of 2020, especially when it comes to race. I always would say, “You already know what to do.” Doing what’s right is not that mysterious. It’s right there in front of us. We know what to do. It’s just it takes work. It takes more work to open space. It’s much easier to just be OK with things as they are, to follow the trends as they’ve been set and have everything status quo. But to be inclusive and to be radically inclusive, that’s going to take a lot more effort. 

So don’t ask me what to do. First of all, educate yourself, because that’s what I have to do every day. I’m not a scholar; I didn’t study this stuff. But if you see a need or you see something that needs addressing, then you have the opportunity to address it. Or not. It’s a journey. It takes time, it takes energy and effort, and it takes education. We don’t know everything. But the last thing you want to do is ask people from a marginalized community to also educate you and also do part of your work.