BackJAZZMATAZZ: Carrington comes calling
Roll over drummer boys, Terri Lyne Carrington is the new queen on the crash and beat block
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There was a time when, barring a few notables like Mary Lou Williams, women in jazz would mean singers and singers only. Happily, those days have been left behind and the resurgent jazz scene now boasts of many ladies on different instruments, performing, composing and leading bands to critical acclaim. Perhaps an excellent instance of this transformation is drummer Terri Lynn Carrington, who is leading from the front in the beat, bang and crash section once considered the exclusive preserve of men.
Playing young since the 1980s, a popular side player with many including Herbie Hancock, Carrington in the past few years has emerged as a strong voice in jazz, creating excellent music with a wide variety of artists. By the turn of the century, she began cutting albums that set her on the path to stardom.
In The Mosaic Project (2011), she assembled an impressive line-up of singers including Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, Gretchen Parlato and Nona Hendryx, with Geri Allen on piano and Esperanza Spalding on bass. Thought-provoking yet accessible, as Carrington wanted, the album features wonderful performances from the all-female cast that won her the 2011 Grammy for the best jazz vocal album. A mix of covers and originals (by Carrington, Allen and Spalding), many numbers stand out—an interesting take on the Beatles’ Michelle, Spalding’s delightful Crayola, Mosaic Triad composed by Carrington.
Locking the beat and letting it roll comes naturally to Carrington. Born into a musical family (her grandfather reportedly played with Fats Weller), she started early, and at 10, performed as special guest with Clark Terry at the Wichita Jazz Festival (Reeves was also there). In Berklee with a scholarship, she found a mentor in the great drummer Jack DeJohnette, who nudged her to New York after she finished music school. A tour with Hancock helped set her up in the big apple, and she started many fruitful associations with the leading lights of jazz, touring with the likes of Wayne Shorter, David Sanborn and Al Jarreau. She continues to tour extensively and her Mosaic Project gigs are in great demand.
By the turn of the century, she started interesting solo projects that congealed into Jazz is a Spirit (2002), which combined energetic bebop with tribal rhythms and was altogether a success musically. She made her intentions clear by starting the album with a declamation of what jazz is (a spirit, if that needs guessing), spoken by actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner and then, in Journey East from West and Journey of Now, let loose with irrepressible tribal drum rolls. It also features lively jams with associates like Hancock and Terence Blanchard. Managing to combine the avant-garde with romanticism, Jazz is a Spirit remains one of her best albums (and my first encounter with Carrington) that showcases the passion with which the drummer lady approaches her music.
The popular success of The Mosaic Project perhaps made Carrington bolder and she started work on her most adventurous venture yet in Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue (2013). In this extraordinary album, she reprised the landmark recording Money Jungle cut in 1962 by Duke Ellington, Max Roach and a Charles Mingus, already the angry young man of jazz.
The album begins with a startling reinterpretation of the title track with a critique of Western capitalism where Carrington rolls her drums beneath the rhetoric of activist and author Michel Rupert and sound clips of speeches by Martin Luther King, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. But Carrington is not out there to exhort and preach, far from it.
Accompanied by the talented young pianist Gerald Clayton and bassist Charles McBride, the album again features many other artists, with the wordless mumble of Terry a special highlight in Fleurette Africaine. In this, featuring the nonagenarian Terry, who gave her the first break, Carrington has come full circle. Not content with merely reinterpreting some of the songs that Ellington, one of the greatest composers in jazz, especially wrote for the album, she composed two of her own and also featured one distinctive piece delivered in signature style by Clayton.
Provocative in Blue, besides being an enjoyable album throughout, is surely a watershed in Carrington’s career and was so recognized in January this year by the Grammy Awards as 2013’s best jazz instrumental album. The first women to win the prize in this category, Carrington has indeed arrived, keeping alive the hope that she’ll keep our feet tapping for many more years.
Jazzmatazz is a fortnightly blog on stories from the world of jazz. For playlists of the music that it will feature, visit here.
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