CARRINGTON, Terri Lyne

Terri Lyne Carrington is an American jazz drummer, composer, bandleader, producer and educator, born in Massachusetts on 4 August 1965. She grew up in a musical family and began playing drums on an instrument that had belonged to her grandfather, Matt Carrington, a drummer who had performed with Fats Waller and Chu Berry. At the age of ten, she received a professional musicians’ union card and began performing with established jazz musicians. She later studied at Berklee College of Music, graduating in 1983.

Carrington established her international career through collaborations with leading jazz musicians, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Clark Terry, Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson and Esperanza Spalding. Alongside her work as a drummer, she has developed a substantial body of work as a composer, arranger and producer, combining jazz with elements of funk, soul, R&B, electronic music and spoken word.

Her first album as a bandleader, Real Life Story (1989), received a Grammy nomination. Subsequent albums include Jazz Is a Spirit (2002), Structure (2004), The Mosaic Project (2011), Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue (2013), Waiting Game (2019) and New Standards Vol. 1 (2022). Her compositions frequently address questions of identity, gender, racial justice and social change. With the ensemble Social Science, she created Waiting Game, an interdisciplinary project combining original jazz compositions with poetry, rap and political commentary.

Carrington has received four Grammy Awards. The Mosaic Project, created with a predominantly female group of performers, won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album. With Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, she became the first woman to win the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album as a bandleader. New Standards Vol. 1 received the same award in 2023. In 2021, she was named an NEA Jazz Master, the United States’ highest national distinction in jazz.

Carrington is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Through this work, she promotes greater recognition of women and non-binary musicians in jazz. In 2022, she published New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers, a collection created to expand the jazz repertoire traditionally dominated by compositions by men. Her later project We Insist 2025!, made with vocalist Christie Dashiell, reinterprets Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s influential Freedom Now Suite in a contemporary social and political context.