Terri Lyne Carrington | Jazz drummer, and a movement

Terri Lyne Carrington had a union card at eleven and a scholarship to Berklee at thirteen.

Forty-odd years later she has three Grammys, an honorary doctorate, a professorship, and an institute at Berklee with her name on the founding documents — and she is still, first and last, a drummer.

Here is one of the most consequential careers in modern jazz.

Who is Terri Lyne Carrington?

Terri Lyne Carrington was born on 4 August 1965 in Medford, Massachusetts, into a musical family — her father a saxophonist, her grandfather a drummer who had played with Fats Waller.

She was a genuine prodigy. A professional union card at eleven, a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music at thirteen, and by her twenties she was working with the very top of the music.

The career

She moved to New York and then Los Angeles, and the sideman list is extraordinary: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Al Jarreau, Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spalding.

She was also the house drummer for The Arsenio Hall Show, which put a young Black woman jazz drummer on American television every weeknight in the early nineties — a fact worth sitting with.

Her own records include The Mosaic Project (2011), which won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue (2013), which won Best Jazz Instrumental Album — making her the first woman to win in that category.

New Standards Vol. 1 (2022) won her a third Grammy.

The Institute

In 2018 she founded the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, where she is artistic director.

Its stated aim is straightforward and unusually concrete: to change who gets to play this music, by changing the repertoire, the teaching and the hiring. The New Standards project — a book of 101 compositions by women — came directly out of it.

Drumeo’s voters gave her Jazz Drummer Of The Year in 2022, citing new album releases and a Hudson Music lead-sheet compilation.

What Terri Lyne Carrington actually does

She is a colourist. Her playing is about texture as much as time — brushes, mallets, rims, the edges of cymbals. There is an enormous amount of sound in her drumming that a straight-ahead player would never reach for.

She swings without weight. Her ride is light and buoyant, and the band floats on it rather than being pushed by it.

She plays modern. Hip-hop and R&B feel sit alongside straight jazz in the same tune, and neither sounds bolted on.

She is a bandleader first. Listen to her own records and the drums are frequently not the focus. That is a compositional choice, and it is one that most drummer-bandleaders cannot make.

She is a producer. She produces her own records and other people’s, which is why they sound the way they do.

Terri Lyne Carrington’s setup

Her cymbal setup is the interesting part — it is very wide, and full of effects that a traditional jazz drummer would never own.

• Cymbals — Zildjian, and a large collection: K Constantinople hi-hat top over a K Custom Session bottom, 16” and 19” K Dark Thin crashes, a 22” K Custom High Definition ride, plus a 9” FX Oriental Trash Splash, a 6” splash, a 10” FX China Trash and a 15” FX Azuka Latin Multi-Crash.
• Sticks — Zildjian Terri Lyne Carrington Artist Series. Sized between a 5A and a 7A, in US select hickory, and built for jazz and light rock rather than volume.

Every era, with buy links, is on Terri Lyne Carrington’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

Her cymbal setup is the lesson, and it is an unusual one for a jazz player.

Mismatch your hi-hats. A heavier bottom under a lighter top gives you a defined chick and a looser open sound at once. It costs nothing if you already own two pairs.

Then buy one small effects cymbal. A trash splash or a small china next to the hats adds a colour that a whole extra crash will not. Our cymbal buying guide covers where effects cymbals earn their place.

And learn brushes. Genuinely the highest-return thing an intermediate drummer can do, and a set costs less than a cheap crash. The Gear Guru will handle the rest.

Where to start listening

• The Mosaic Project (2011). The Grammy winner, and a statement of intent.
• Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue (2013). Reworking Ellington, Mingus and Roach, which takes some nerve.
• Herbie Hancock — live footage from the 1980s. Very young, entirely unfazed.
• New Standards Vol. 1 (2022). The institute’s work, as music.
• Any Arsenio Hall Show clip. Different job, same time feel.

Final thoughts

There is a version of Carrington’s story that is only about the barriers — first woman to win that Grammy, one of very few women on those bandstands, the institute built to fix it.

All of that is true and important. It also risks obscuring the simplest fact, which is that she is a superb drummer: a light, colourful, harmonically aware player who makes bands sound better.

The institute exists because she is in a position to build it. She is in that position because of the playing.

See Terri Lyne Carrington’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Roy Haynes — the jazz drummer whose career her own most resembles in length and range.