On Off the Record WESM's Stephen Philip Harvey talks with GRAMMY® award-winning drummer, composer and bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington about her new album We Resist! and her musical journey.
HARVEY: In 1960, a protest album We Insist! was released by Jazz drummer Max Roach. 65 years later, the drum still beats and a pair of musicians implore you to keep insisting. You're listening to Off the Record with Steven Philip Harvey, where we sit down and talk to a variety of musicians on today's music scene. Today we're sitting down with Terry Lyne Carrington. She's an NEA Jazz master, Doris Duke artist, and four time Grammy winning drummer, composer, producer, and educator. With this release, We Insist 2025, Carrington and co-leader, Christie Dashiell pick up the cadence with arrangements of the original suite and new music added.
CARRINGTON: Well, unfortunately, the issues from We Insist from 1960, which were primarily driven by the Civil Rights era and race relations and racism, those points are still valid. We have not had the healing and reckoning that we had hoped for, I think back in the sixties. So all of those themes are still relevant, but also I added a piece called Freedom Is that deals with themes that we're talking about today, sexism and misogyny. Woman's right to choose what to do with her body, ableism, dealing with food injustice. I really tried to mention something about so many different things that are on the table today because it is intersectional. I mean, as an African-American woman, I can't really choose between race and gender.
HARVEY: There are several musical highlights in this re-imagining of the Max Roach suite. In some cases, it continues the themes, but in others it updates and adds themes to broaden the perspective of what freedom is.
CARRINGTON: If you look at a song like Freedom Day on the original, it was very fast, very aggressive, and you knew that this was about black freedom. I turned it into a ballad. There's actually two versions on this record, one that I arranged, one that Christie Dashiell arranged, and the way we approached it musically, and the way I asked her to approach it vocally is kind of more from a woman's point of view. It really speaks to the freedom that women need [and] desire in such a male dominated society.
HARVEY: Carrington has worked in additional ways to insist upon equity in her career. She heads the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice.
CARRINGTON: So the study is basically showing the lack of gender diversity within these academic institutions. It is showing that if you take away jazz vocals and you look at just the professors and the faculty at over 200 institutions across the country, which is a study that Lara Pellegrinelli did that we sponsor is only 8% of women as professors and jazz faculty. So we're pointing to how really from middle school to high school to college, why it's so common that women have dropped out as they have matriculated.
HARVEY: In all of her work, Carrington insists upon equality and empathy with an eagerness to keep the conversation going. This was off the record, hosted by me, Steven Philip Harvey, a Delmarva Public Media production. Thanks for listening to our interview with Terry Lynn Carrington. To hear more off the record interviews or to listen to other original segments like this, visit delmarvapublicmedia.org.
