Terri Lyne Carrington: “There’s been an unwritten narrative that men play music and women sing it”

This is a golden age for protest music. The horrors of contemporary politics have stoked a fire in jazz and in the last few years we’ve seen a new flowering of politicised albums, from Nicole Mitchell, Ambrose Akinmusire, Sons of Kemet and countless others. We’ve also seen the rise of overtly political groups, with bios that read like manifestos, among them the ‘liberation oriented’ Irreversible Entanglements and R+R=NOW. It was surely no coincidence that Archie Shepp chose to revisit some of his 1970s civil rights repertoire at the London Jazz Festival last year. This is the decade when jazz woke up once again. More than ever musicians are feeling compelled to speak out.

Drummer and producer Terri Lyne Carrington has often made work with a political slant. Her Grammy-winning 2013 album Money Jungle: Provocative In Blue skewered late-stage capitalism. Her two Mosaic Project albums brought together some of the most exciting players on the US scene, all of whom happened to be women. But her latest release, Waiting Game, written over the past two-and-a-half years as her concern about the state of the world reached what she calls “red level, the danger zone” is by far her most politically ambitious and outspoken yet.

The project started with the track ‘Bells (Ring Loudly)’, composed by keys-player Aaron Parks who, along with guitarist Matthew Stevens, forms the core of Carrington’s new group, Social Science. Carrington was moved to write some lyrics for the piece, a meditation on police brutality read by actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner: “Sirens swell, morphing into church bells, signalling another unjustifiable death.”

From there the project expanded to tackle social injustices of all kinds. On ‘Purple Mountains’ superb D.C. MC Kokayi blasts the US government’s treatment of Native Americans. ‘Pray The Gay Away’ opens with a parody of gospel singer Kim Burrell’s infamous homophobic sermon and counters the hypocrisy of “religious radicals” with the line “we need to pray the hate away.” On ‘No Justice (for political prisoners)’ vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello takes the lead, weaving a narrative about institutional racism and the prison-industrial complex around soundbites from fugitive activist Assata Shakur and incarcerated writer Mumia Abu-Jamal, who recorded the lines especially for Carrington from his Pennsylvania prison cell, “in the land of the so-called free.”

Then comes Part Two, a 40-minute free improvisation called ‘Dreams and Desperate Measures’ in which Carrington, Parks, Stevens and bassist Esperanza Spalding explore the idea of freedom in music more broadly.

“It’s kind of like a Pandora’s box,” says Carrington, speaking to me over the phone from her home in Woburn, Massachusetts. “Once you open it, it all pours out.”

One of the standout tracks is ‘The Anthem’, dominated by a string of verses from Rapsody, a brilliant North Carolina rapper who I first heard on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. “Break down the walls till patriarchy falls,” she urges. “Speak aloud the anthem for woman.”

Of all the injustices addressed on the album, Carrington has been most active in the fight against gender inequality – in the jazz world in particular. Last year, conversations with female students (“stories of harassment, of not being included, of no access”) led her to found the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at Berklee College of Music, where she teaches. The activist Angela Davis, a good friend of Carrington’s and one of the inspirational women celebrated on Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is A Reptile, sits on the board. She came up with the institute’s name. Its slogan is ‘Jazz Without Patriarchy’. Its aim? To bring about a cultural shift.

I ask Carrington how she would describe the jazz world’s attitude towards gender and she laughs, as if to say: Where do I start?

“Antiquated, archaic… That’s not everybody but it’s the overall narrative, the system that we’ve all participated in, men and women,” she explains. “There’s been an unwritten narrative that men play music and women sing it. Sprinkled in you have these women who played instruments, but there were far more women that did play that were not supported in the same way and many women that wanted to but didn’t because it was too difficult. It’s hard enough learning how to play the music. Having these extra obstacles often makes you not want to do it.”

“People just don’t think about it,” she continues. “I’ve talked to a lot of people and they’re just like: ‘Wow. I look at my record collection and I have hardly any women playing instruments.’ And they never thought anything was wrong with it. We were brought up to see that as normal. I’m not mad at anybody because I was brought up the same way.”

Carrington is the first to acknowledge that her own experience as a female instrumentalist has been different. She was born into a musical family. Her grandfather was a respected drummer who played with Fats Waller. Her father was the president of the Boston Jazz Society. When she was just 11 years old she won a scholarship to Berklee. In her teens she was mentored by Jack DeJohnette, Wayne Shorter and Quincy Jones and she soon went on to work with a host of greats, including Herbie Hancock and Pharoah Sanders.

“I had opportunity and access and support and that gives you ownership in the music,” says Carrington. “Nobody could tell me I didn’t belong. This isn’t the experience for most young women.”

Recently she’s been thinking more about the legacy she wants to leave behind. “What kind of legacy have I left?” She asks. “Other than possibly breaking down some walls as a woman playing the drums… I’m not saying that’s not important, but for me I had to look more seriously. It’s more about doing the work that’s needed right now. You have to be concerned with the community you live and work in and you have to try to make it better for the person coming behind you.”

As we talk, Carrington is walking around a pond near her home. It’s where she does her best thinking. Over the phone her voice sounds gentle and relaxed. Her sentences often start with an implied shrug (“you know...”) even when she’s talking about issues of the utmost gravity. It gives her an aura of deep calm. Parks calls her: “A force of nature… One of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met.”

She’s also humblingly empathetic. When I ask if she feels that today’s musicians have a duty to address political issues she says: “I do for me, but I don’t pass judgement on people who don’t feel that way. There’s a lot of great music that I love that has nothing to do with social consciousness, created by people who were not as conscious as we would like them to be. That doesn’t take away from the greatness.”

A few days later when I email to ask if she was fan of Kim Burrell prior to Burrell’s homophobic outburst she writes: “I was a fan and still am a fan of her music. I think her beliefs are not universal and not in alignment with supporting all marginalised people, which is really too bad. But everyone is on their own journey of consciousness.”

Her advice for young musicians is: “They should be who they are and do what they do and we create an environment that supports that. That’s why it’s everybody’s work. It’s not the person coming into its work. They already have their work set out learning how to play.”

The goal of Waiting Game is “to develop more humanity in the world,” Carrington says. She strikes me as the embodiment of that message.

Recently she’s been particularly influenced by the work of the Black Youth Project 100, which encourages people to see the world from a black, queer, feminist perspective. “Those are the three most marginalised groups,” she explains, “and when those three groups are liberated we all are. It’s a collective liberation. Collective empowerment. No-one’s liberated until everyone is.”

So how do we achieve that in the jazz world? I ask. “How do you dismantle a system?” She muses. “The first thing is, people that love the music, truly love the music, have to look at it and say: ‘Something’s wrong’. They have to agree that the music has not reached its full potential because 50 per cent of the population have not had a presence in it. If you think everything is OK I wouldn’t waste my time talking to you.”

Fortunately, I don’t. I don’t think it’s OK that you can still turn on the radio and listen to an hour-long jazz show that doesn’t feature a single female instrumentalist, and I share the frustration of bands like Nérija who are often defined by their gender in a mainstream media hungry for click-bait headlines and snappy angles, something we spoke about at length when I interviewed them for Jazzwise’s September issue. I’m not even sure it’s that OK that I’m writing this article. Is a white, heterosexual, cisgendered man, someone who has enjoyed 30 years of exactly the kind of privilege Carrington is fighting against, really who we need to hear from on these issues?

I feel a little better about that after talking to Matthew Stevens, who’s in the same boat. “I’m trying to be more aware of my role as a straight white man in the world,” he tells me over the phone, while he’s out guitar shopping in New York. “I think our place is to listen right now… Just the act of listening and engaging in the conversation... It’s about amplifying, not speaking for people.”

As Stevens sees it, we have a moral obligation to the women in our lives and to society at large, but he also feels that greater equality is in the interests of everyone – even those who stand to lose some of their privilege. He points to societies where a greater number of women are employed in executive positions in companies, or where men do a greater share of the child care. “People in those societies are happier than they are in countries where people fulfil more traditional gender roles. There’s less anxiety,” he says.

Aaron Parks has also been doing some thinking. “I live in America and I’m not blind,” he laughs. “The systemic racism in this country… that’s nothing new and it’s something I’ve been deeply disturbed by for a long time.” But Waiting Game has taught him more specifics, about the modern day slavery of the prison industrial complex for example, where the labour of inmates (many of them black) is exploited for a profit. On the subject of gender, he remembers being struck by a comment Esperanza Spalding made on a panel in New York a couple of years ago.

“She was talking about the trio she had with Geri Allen and Terri and how, when she played in that band, there was something in her that relaxed and was able to be fully creative and immersed, because she could look up and make eye contact with everybody in the band without it being… somehow interpreted as inviting of a sexual advance.”

As a man, Parks didn’t have to worry about any of that. “I’m just trying to create,” he says. “Realising so many women in the music have this on their mind as well…” He trails off, as if the implications are dawning on him all over again.

Recently he’s been working with a new quintet with young drummer Savannah Harris and saxophonist María Grand. “I don’t want there to be any risk of anything getting misinterpreted,” says Parks. “I want to create a place where we play music and grow together.”

Last year, Grand was at the centre of the jazz world’s own #MeToo scandal. She is currently being sued for defamation by Steve Coleman after she accused him of pressuring her into having a sexual relationship with him in exchange for mentoring (the court has since granted Maria Grand a summary judgement on Coleman's claims).

“It’s an interesting time and it’s tricky in lots of ways,” says Parks, of the push for greater equality. “But I’m glad that we’re starting to have these types of conversations. Things have been really messed up for a while.”

As we talk, it strikes me as bitterly ironic that jazz, an art form that values freedom and self-expression above all else, could have prevented so many people from enjoying just that, and for so long. If we achieve greater equality, I’m also interested to know what Carrington thinks it will sound like.

“We haven’t really heard that yet because most of the women playing have tried to be one of the guys,” she explains. “What is good and what is not has been determined by men. That male experience has to be in the music because we can only do what we are. If you walk through life with privilege and power that’s going to come through in the music. If you walk through life more marginalised then that’s going to come through in the music. How do we think the blues happened in the first place? Because a marginalised group of people had to express themselves. Now you have another group of marginalised people who haven’t expressed themselves, on instruments.”

The tide is turning though and Carrington is optimistic. “Twenty per cent of all millennials in the US don’t consider themselves cisgendered or straight,” she says. “People are redefining and reshaping gender roles. That’s a lot of people and that shows you the future. The days are numbered for what has been the defined norm for privilege, which is white, male, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied and with resources. I just want to live long enough to see it.”

She’s back home from her walk now. There’s a chorus of yapping as she turns off the alarm and opens her front door. Before she goes, I want to know about the title-track, ‘Waiting Game’. “I wrote that after Trump got elected,” she laughs. “It’s about waiting for him to leave, but it’s also a metaphor for other things we’re waiting for.” She refers me to the album cover. A young black girl stands in a playground facing a pair of Double Dutch skipping ropes, waiting for her moment. “It’s harder to get in while those ropes are moving,” says Carrington, “but you know she’s going to jump in and kill it. You can just tell.”

Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science play Kings Place on 16 November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival

This article originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!