Terri Lyne Carrington on her mission to correct jazz history: 'Women don't get called geniuses enoug
Terri Lyne Carrington on her mission to correct jazz history: ‘Women don’t get called geniuses enough’
Kate Hutchinson
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Drumming up support … Terri Lyne Carrington has curated an all-female set of standards. Photograph: Michael Goldman
The best-known book of jazz standards contains 399 pieces written by men and just one by a woman. With the all-female New Standards, the pioneering drummer-bandleader is undoing the idea of jazz as a boys’ club
@katehutchinson
Thu 15 Sep 2022 10.00 EDT
Last modified on Thu 15 Sep 2022 13.38 EDT
Imagine for a moment that you are a jazz musician looking for a standard to master – one of those timeless songs widely accepted as the backbone of the genre. You flick through The Real Book for inspiration – the best-selling jazz songbook of all time, with its distinctive peachy cover. There is music by Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, the late Chick Corea – untold greats. But scanning its 400 songs, something seems off: only one of these jazz standards is written by a woman. Grammy-winning drummer Terri Lyne Carrington knew this wasn’t the full picture. The Real Book has Ann Ronell’s Willow Weep for Me and some songs attributed to Billie Holiday, she says, but it overlooks the countless women who made jazz history. Carrington is also a professor at Berklee College of Music, where the first Real Book was devised in the 1970s. Her upcoming project, New Standards, is a corrective: a sheet book of jazz compositions written entirely by women. In addition, she selected 11 to record for a studio album, joined by guests including Ravi Coltrane (son of John and Alice), singer and flautist Melanie Charles and avant-garde trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusirie (and it will be rounded off by a multimedia exhibition at Detroit’s Carr Center). “Geniuses,” Carrington stresses. “Women don’t get called that enough.”
A drummer for more than 40 years, Carrington has worked with everyone from Hancock to Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Teena Marie and Ela Minus. New Standards also underlines her skill as a curator, bringing together 101 composers from across continents and different eras. There are American virtuosos (harpists Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, trombonist Melba Liston, avant-garde pianist Carla Bley – whose former husband, Paul, was in the original book); two Latin-American contemporaries, Brazilian jazz-pianist Eliane Elias and Chilean saxophonist Patricia Zárate Pérez; and “unknowns” such as Sara Cassey, a Detroit pianist whose compositions were played by male greats such as Thelonious Monk and Gene Krupa while she remained in the wings. The new generation feature, too: among them, New York City harpist Brandee Younger, London saxophonist Nubya Garcia, and Jaimie Branch, a dynamic player on progressive Chicago label International Anthem who died in August, aged 39. “She played the heck out of the trumpet,” Carrington says of Branch. “And her personality shines through in her graphic scores – being a renegade, making people think. It’s a huge loss.”
Like Branch, the composers on New Standards have eschewed conventional jazz structures and pushed the form forward. While traditionally it has been men portrayed as innovators, these women are mavericks in their own right. Zooming from her home in Boston, Carrington motions to her T-shirt, which bears the slogan of one of her gender-balancing initiatives: Jazz Without Patriarchy. “When you think in those equitable terms, women would be visionaries just like men.”
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Terri Lyne Carrington performs with Cassandra Wilson’s band at Central Park SummerStage, New York. Photograph: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Carrington grew up aware that “there weren’t other little girls like me”. A child prodigy born into a family of drummers, she was 10 when flugelhorn player Clark Terry took her to the Wichita jazz festival as his special guest, and 11 when she was offered a scholarship to Berklee – after none other than Ella Fitzgerald had insisted that the school president watch the young drummer play.
Earlier in her 40-year career, Carrington declined to play on all-women lineups. That changed with her sixth album, 2011’s The Mosaic Project, where she assembled a group of heavyweights including Esperanza Spalding, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Nona Hendryx and Sheila E. Despite its gale-force brilliance, Carrington says major labels initially turned it down as she struggled to be accepted as a drummer-turned-bandleader. “The comments I got back were: I was too ambitious, I was never going to make a good leader. Even though we, of course, have Art Blakey, Max Roach, Elvin Jones …”
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New Standards Vol 1 is released on 16 September on Candid Records.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/sep/15/terri-lyne-carrington-on-her-mission-to-correct-jazz-history-women-dont-get-called-geniuses-enough
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