Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science bio
Along with a message of wakefulness, inclusiveness, and noncompliance, we’ve summoned our musical influences to offer an eclectic alternative to the mainstream. Music transcends, breaks barriers, strengthens us, and heals old wounds. Music is Social Science.
Grammy Award–winning drummer, producer, educator, activist, and 2019 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, Terri Lyne Carrington created Social Science to boldly confront social justice issues. Galvanized by seismic changes in the ever-evolving social and political landscape, the band’s stunning double-disc debut, Waiting Game, takes its place in the stirring lineage of politically conscious and activist music, expressing an unflinching, inclusive, and compassionate view of humanity’s breaks and bonds through an expansive program that melds jazz, R&B, indie rock, contemporary improvisation, and hip-hop.
Carrington also founded the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where she holds the position of Zildjian Chair in Performance. Her projects echo a drive that combines her musical passion with her profound regard for humanity, inflamed by the cultural divisiveness brought into the light by the 2016 presidential election. “I think there’s an awakening happening in society in general,” she says. “I feel a calling in my life to merge my artistry with any form of activism that I’m able to engage in.”
Waiting Game is not the first time Carrington has addressed her concerns for society, though it is the most direct and impactful. On her Grammy-winning 2013 release Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, she offered a 21st-century reimagining of the Ellington-Mingus-Roach classic with a jaundiced eye on late-stage capitalism. Her previous and first Grammy-winning album, The Mosaic Project, let its all-star, all-female ensemble speak for itself, though its argument for gender equity in jazz rang through loud and clear.
At that time, Carrington preferred to focus on the music of The Mosaic Project rather than the gender of its musicians, though her thinking has shifted in the years since. “For a long time women in jazz didn’t really embrace the issue because many of us were involved and somewhat invested in this patriarchal system that’s controlled jazz for so long,” she explains. “The culture nudged us to want to be considered one of the guys. There came a turning point for me where I realized we had the whole thing backwards. We need to be our authentic selves playing this music, and that needs to be accepted and nurtured. The same opportunities that help to develop young male musicians need to be there to develop young female musicians, and traditionally that hasn’t been the case, especially in early stage development.”
Carrington cites as one of her inspirations for the change in approach the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), the African American youth organization founded by activists Charlene Carruthers and Cathy Cohen in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin. The organization’s work helped Carrington to more fully integrate her personal identity into her musical life.
“I’ve realized that at this point in my life the lines between my politics and personal life have become blurred,” she says. “BYP100 really resonates with me as a political home for anti-capitalists, radical Black feminists, abolitionists, artists, educators, and many other types of freedom fighters. It’s helped me to see the value in the idea of collective liberation, which is really the core message of Waiting Game. I aspire to see the world through a Black, queer, feminist lens and want to encourage others to do so as well because no one is liberated until everyone is.”
