The Social Science Music of Terri Lyne Carrington

This chapter explores the music, life, and institutional building of drummer, feminist, and artistic director for the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, Terri Lyne Carrington. Through and examination of her cultural work, this chapter discusses Carrington’s attack on patriarchy in jazz culture through Black feminist thought reflected in her musical practices. Her work exposes the irony of the Black aesthetic values of inclusion at the foundation of African American improvised music in contrast with the patriarchal practice of marginalizing women improvisers. Carrington’s musical arrangement of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s composition “Echo” on The Mosaic Project (2011) is analyzed as linked critique of anti-blackness over and several compositions on Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science (2019) are analyzed as an intersectional critique of police brutality, gay conversion therapy, celebration of Black feminism, and gender inequity represented respectively in “Bells (Ring Loudly),” “Pray the Gay Away,” “Anthem,” and “Purple Mountains.”