Terri Lyne Carrington: New Standards

This week on Fridays Live, SFJAZZ presents master drummer, bandleader, and activist Terri Lyne Carrington. As founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, Carrington has curated a newly published compilation of New Standards composed by women, including Carla Bley, Cassandra Wilson, Marilyn Crispell, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Eliane Elias, Jaime Branch, Luciana Souza, Hiromi, Emily Remler, Anat Cohen, and others. This program draws from this compilation as Carrington challenges inequity and forges a new legacy for jazz – a world of jazz without patriarchy. Joining her for this transformative show at SFJAZZ are some of the leading musicians from the current scene: pianist Kris Davis, trumpeter Etienne Charles, vocalist Michael Mayo, and guitarist Matthew Stevens.

Throughout her 35-year recording career, virtuoso drummer, composer, and bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington has challenged assumptions.
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TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON:
"NEW STANDARDS" AND SHAPING JAZZ'S FUTURE

February 1, 2023 | by Natalie Weiner

When Terri Lyne Carrington says “new standards,” she means several things. As those who saw her first presentation of the project at SFJAZZ last year know, there is a literal component: adding “standards,” or standard repertoire, to the jazz canon so that it might better reflect the true diversity of the genre’s contributors. She performed some of the potential additions she’s fighting for at that show with an all-star ensemble, and when she returns to Miner Auditorium on February 24 (broadcast on Fridays Live), she’ll perform others from her collection, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women Composers, published last fall.

It’s about the pieces, about somewhat forcefully inserting women composers into an often exclusionary jazz history — but the pieces are also a means to a much more ambitious end: “Setting new standards period, in the culture and in the industry,” as Carrington, currently a Resident Artistic Director at SFJAZZ, explains it. The acclaimed drummer, composer and bandleader has been working towards that mission implicitly and explicitly for years, balancing her creative and artistic goals with the nagging, unfair weight of the inescapable “woman in jazz” label which, though generally well-intentioned, often does more harm than good.

Her first recorded rebuke of jazz’s patriarchal convention came with The Mosaic Project, a two-album series that featured all-women bands. When she performed that music live, including at SFJAZZ in 2015, the bands usually included a mix of men and women — just as performances of New Standards have and will continue to. “At the time I wasn't articulating it, but I think I knew innately that that's really what gender justice is,” Carrington says, emphasizing the importance of having people of all genders fighting for equality. “It's not all women's situation [to resolve]. It’s about looking at gender equity, and not siloing women.”

The New Standards project, which includes the aforementioned collection of compositions as well as an accompanying album and ongoing live presentations, is a continuation of The Mosaic Project, “in a sense,” as Carrington puts it, “but with me being a lot further along with my understanding of gender.”

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