Terri Lyne Carrington, Part 1: Richmond Public Schools and Virginia State University Jazz Workshops
A fourteen-year-old “total musician” schooled Virginia in 1979
I’m not sure what to call Terri Lyne Carrington. Duke Ellington’s famous compliment for such artists was “beyond category.” Wayne and Garth pleading “We are not worthy” before their heavy metal idols comes to mind. In such instances, categorization seems reductive. Her old drum sticks are at the Smithsonian.
This week I’ll introduce the story of a set of jazz workshops she conducted in Richmond and Petersburg in 1979 as a fourteen-year-old. (That’s not a typo.) Next week, I’ll publish excerpts of an interview we did in November 2021 for an article I wrote about the similarly uncategorizable music educator D. Antoinette Handy.
Handy herself had interviewed the teenaged Carrington after the ’79 workshops. In addition to being a classically trained flutist, Handy was a prodigious scholar. In my article I quote Handy’s interview from Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras:
“I want to be a total musician, … I don’t want to be known as just a drummer,” [Terri Lyne Carrington] had said on the first day of the workshop in an interview for the organizer’s public radio program, Black Virginia, broadcast on WRFK-FM from Richmond’s Union Theological Seminary. Almost 42 years later, this would seem to be the case.
There you have it—a “total musician.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
At the time I interviewed her, Carrington was putting the finishing touches on New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers (Berklee Press, 2022), a landmark publication that includes Virginia composer-performers Karen Briggs (“Pulses of Adventure”) and René Marie (“Rufast Daliarg”). The command, commitment, and creativity she showed at fourteen is still going strong today.
Back in 1977, while serving as Richmond Public Schools’s first artist-in-residence, Antoinette Handy saw a feature on Carrington in Ebony and started contemplating bringing her to Virginia. Later, in April 1979, Handy went to see the prodigy for herself at The Famous Ballroom before a workshop at Howard University. According to Terri Lyne’s father Sonny, Handy eventually got in touch through Virginia State alum Dr. Billy Taylor, of Jazzmobile and “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” fame. Sonny had spent a year as a student at VSC and Handy was a former faculty member and administrator. The groove was locked in.
The workshops came together in 1979 with support from Terri Lyne’s equipment sponsors, Slingerland and Zildjian, and a local drum shop. The total musician presented jazz education workshops for both students and faculty at Virginia State and Richmond Public Schools on October 24, 25, and 26. Handy praised her as a “master clinician” and recommended her for similar events around the country. B. J. Brown of the Richmond Jazz Society said, “It was incredible to see such a young lady with poise and swing.” Influential Richmond jazz educators like trombonist Charles Newton and saxophonist James “Saxmo” Gates were also in attendance.
Antoinette could see this, what this was going to do for the region of Richmond at that time. –Matt “Sonny” Carrington
The importance of peers in education, especially in the teenage years, cannot be overstated. As Carrington’s father Sonny told me, “The kids could relate to her because she was the same age.” Terri Lyne could break down for her peers the hundreds of years of experience she had gleaned from working with elder masters such as Clark Terry, Oscar Peterson, and Buddy Rich. Antoinette Handy couldn’t have found a better jazz messenger for Virginia kids at that time and place.
While RPS legally desegregated in 1971, white flight and historically segregated housing and employment practices meant the participants in Carrington’s Virginia jazz workshops were predominantly Black. In a year when pop like MJ’s Off the Wall topped the charts, Handy’s brilliant jazz education insight wasn’t choosing a peerless “total musician.” It was choosing a peer.