Terri Lyne Carrington: Jazz Group of the Year/Drummer of the Year

News, From the Magazine, Terri Lyne Carrington, Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science

By Hannah Edgar I Jul. 27, 2023

Social Science’s personnel now hinges on a six-person core: Carrington, guitarist Matthew Stevens, pianist Aaron Parks, multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin, and vocalists Carl “Kokayi” Walker and Debo Ray.
(Photo: C. Andrew Hoven)

When she heard her band Social Science was named DownBeat’s Jazz Group of the Year for the second time in the magazine’s annual Critics Poll, Terri Lyne Carrington was, of course, honored.

But for all her accolades — sharing stages all over the world with greats from Herbie Hancock to Wayne Shorter, winning Grammys four times over and directing a pathbreaking institute for gender equity at Berklee — Carrington’s other nod, as Drummer of the Year, still floored her.

“It’s something I thought would never happen,” Carrington admits on a video call from her home in Boston. “It means something different because it’s related to my original craft. There’s a really beautiful feeling of not just satisfaction, but a message that I’m doing the right thing on the right path.”

Make that things, plural. Carrington has been prolific in the past few years, even by her ever-industrious standards. In September, she released the first volume of New Standards, recording charts by women composers published in her lead-sheet anthology of the same name (Berklee Press). She released a children’s book the same month, recounting the story of her trio with Esperanza Spalding and the late Geri Allen. And she just re-released TLC & Friends (1981), a from-the-vaults stunner she recorded at 16 with heavyweights George Coleman, Kenny Barron, Buster Williams and her dad, Sonny Carrington.

All the while, she’s been touring with Social Science, the band she debuted with 2019’s Waiting Game. Social Science’s personnel now hinges on the same six-person core: Carrington, guitarist Matthew Stevens, pianist Aaron Parks, multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin (also in Art of Living, a quintet project Carrington began touring this year) and vocalists Carl “Kokayi” Walker and Debo Ray. (Founding member Kassa Overall, an MC and drummer, has since departed the group to focus on his solo ventures.)

The seed that would become Social Science was planted through texts between Carrington, Stevens and Parks, who toured Carrington’s Money Jungle together in 2015 and have shared a jocular, easy rapport ever since. All three agree the band’s chemistry and team spirit is unique — Parks describes the band collaboratively writing chord progressions during the early sessions which would become Waiting Game.

“Every gig, there’s a moment where I’m just like, God-damn!” Parks says. “I like that I’m perfectly happy with a gig whether or not we play an incredible, amazing individual solo — everybody in this band obviously can play a killer solo. But in addition to being a band ourselves, we can become a support band for featured artists. … It shapeshifts and creates a different container for whatever guests we might have. I think we all [agree] it’s about the whole of the thing.”

Indeed, Waiting Game features cameos from star artists like Spalding (playing on the album’s all-instrumental, freely improvised second half), Rapsody and Meshell Ndegeocello. The voices of political dissidents Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal even appear on Ndegeocello’s track, “No Justice (For Political Prisoners).” Abu-Jamal contributed his specially for the album in a telephone call from the Pennsylvania state correctional facility, where he remains imprisoned.

Carrington says Social Science’s latest composition, “Abolition Song” — included in the band’s current set lists, with music by Guerin and lyrics by Carrington — takes the anti-carceral themes of “No Justice” still further. She cites prison abolition, climate justice and health equity as among the causes the band hopes to throw its musical weight behind in a Waiting Game follow-up, still in the brainstorming phase.

“The themes on the first record were very clear and created a strong narrative, because the topics were just, like, boom. But I think we can also be subtle and talk about things that are branches, as opposed to just the roots,” Carrington says.

Carrington admitted in an interview with Questlove last year that Waiting Game remains the only album in her discography she can listen to without cringing. She still feels that way, again citing the album’s freshness and seamlessness.

“Even though it doesn’t feel like an album by people that are deeply entrenched in jazz, it still feels like a jazz album — with odd time signatures, interesting forms and improvisation on pretty much every song,” Carrington says. “Often potpourri-style records can sound like a mess. But it felt fairly cohesive, and it was definitely authentic to us.”

For someone as self-critical as Carrington, she says TLC & Friends, her recent reissue, has gone down pretty easily, too. Chalk it up to grace for her teenage self. “I don’t go back and listen to it, but when I put it on, I can smile instead of cringe because I’m so far away from it. There are so many [musical choices] that I wouldn’t make now,” she says.

If anything, TLC & Friends raises the same kind of questions that fuel Carrington’s work with Berklee’s Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and Next Jazz Legacy, a New Music USA partnership supporting career development for gender-marginalized jazz musicians.

Just before recording TLC & Friends, Carrington was noticed by Max Roach, who offered to produce her debut record. He approached Blue Note executive Bruce Lundvall, who initially OK’d the project, only for the label to suddenly and inexplicably reverse course. It wouldn’t be the last time Carrington suspected unequal treatment from labels: Despite netting a Grammy nomination for Real Life Story, her 1989 debut on Verve Forecast, she says she spent the first 20 years of her career struggling to land record deals.

“I do feel like, traditionally, there are more limitations when it comes to women doing things. People have often asked me about glass ceilings,” she says. “I never accepted any glass ceilings as a drummer. But if I look back over my career, things definitely happened. [Recording TLC & Friends] was just another way of doing something yourself — not letting the structures in place inhibit you from doing something. Nobody really heard the record [when it came out]. But at least I have something to say, ‘Yeah, I did do this back then,’ whether on Blue Note or not.” DB