Angela Y. Davis appears on "Abolition Song," the tenth track of Trip the Night Fantastic, the second album from Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science. Across its thirteen songs, the record also takes up child trafficking and family separation, queer identity, women's autonomy, biodiversity loss, and animal rights, and Carrington aimed all of it at the dance floor. Ledisi, Arooj Aftab, Lizz Wright, Christie Dashiell, Moor Mother, Brandee Younger, and Marc Ribot are among the several dozen musicians who also turn up.
Carrington received her first union card in Boston at ten, the youngest musician in the city to hold one, and Berklee College of Music gave her a full scholarship at eleven. Jack DeJohnette encouraged her move to New York in 1983, where she worked with Stan Getz, Pharoah Sanders, and Cassandra Wilson. Later that decade in Los Angeles, she was the house drummer for The Arsenio Hall Show and then for Quincy Jones's late-night show VIBE. She has since played on more than a hundred records.
Carrington has worked at this scale since The Mosaic Project in 2011, an album of women instrumentalists and vocalists that won her a Grammy. Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue followed two years later and made her the first woman to win Best Jazz Instrumental Album. She founded the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, directs Detroit's Carr Center, and holds an NEA Jazz Master fellowship. The record before this one, We Insist 2025! with Christie Dashiell, reimagined Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln's Freedom Now Suite.
Lawrence Peryer hosted Terri Lyne Carrington on The Tonearm Podcast shortly after the album's release. They talked about how she works with the musicians she hires, what she has learned about putting records out on her own terms, and where the drums now sit among everything else she does.
You can hear the full conversation in the audio player embedded below. The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Lawrence: You've been busy. Tell me about taking this music to the people.
Terri Lyne: Oh, it's been great. We've only done about three or four gigs. We were in Newport August 1, and it was pretty amazing. People were touched by the music. Some people were crying. I think people are sensitive right now to a lot of things that are going on, and it felt powerful. We felt good.
Lawrence: When you play a place like Newport versus a broader audience that's just there to dance or to sit in the sun and drink their wine and eat cheese—do you feel the difference?
Terri Lyne: Yeah, I mean, you can always feel when there are people just at a festival to have a Sunday outing. The difference is when you have an attentive crowd, and they're really tuned in and listening. It's always nice in general when you feel like the people are with you, because sometimes you're not sure people are being entertained or engaged with.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about the album title. What's the play on words going on there?
Terri Lyne: "Trip the Light Fantastic" is a reference from a John Milton poem from the 1600s. Matthew Stevens came up with that when we were trying to think of dance-related titles, because this was our version of making a dance record. I said, yeah, that's great. Let's flip it to Trip the Night Fantastic, to reference the darkness that's happening around us right now. That's what we're trying to trip up while we dance.
Lawrence: There was quite a chunk of time between when you met Aaron Parks and Matthew Stevens and when you first recorded with them.
Terri Lyne: It took time to make the first album, which came out in 2019. So that record took the better part of three years. This record took a little over two years.
I knew that I wanted it to be quicker than the last one, because the last one was really drawn out. It would have been even faster, but I put We Insist in the middle. So this one was about 80 percent done, and I realized I wanted to record a tribute to Max Roach during his centennial. So I stopped everything and worked on We Insist 2025.
Lawrence: Did that break influence the material at all? The record and the lyrics feel so ripped from the headlines. And then the other side of it is like, man, these things are all too common and all too timeless in a sick way.
Terri Lyne: Actually, it didn't really affect it. Maybe one song, but for the most part, everything was already written. So you're right, it's too bad that some of this stuff is more timeless than we'd like to think.
Lawrence: Do you get concerned at all with the music being rooted in time? I mean, I would love it if twenty years from now the lyrical content on this record was irrelevant.
Terri Lyne: Exactly. That's the goal.
Lawrence: But do you think about that at all—that this roots the record too much in time?
Terri Lyne: I don't think about it, because I think that is one of the beauties of art. It does represent the times that it was created, and it says something about that time, and it's beautiful when people look back, and you can see what was happening during that time—the news, or the headlines, or reading something. You can feel it in a different way when you're observing it through art.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with, as you said, the standalone art. Art for art's sake. I think we are creative beings when we decide to do this for a living. It's because we have this well of creativity that needs to be expressed. Sometimes it's going to be about everything we're experiencing in life, and if you're more about humanity and your neighbor and the collective versus the individual, then you're going to include things that affect other people.
But then sometimes the same artist may have a moment of just reflecting on their own personal life, and things that aren't community-related. So I think we have the freedom to do both. I know I would get bored, even as a listener, with people that only focus on themselves and aren't thinking about how we're connected. These social justice issues—well, that's one way that you're connected to other people, because we're all experiencing some of this stuff together.
I think both are valid, and I try to encourage my students at Berklee to think about the big picture, and think about their legacy and what they're leaving behind—even as young as they are, to start thinking in that way, and start thinking about a mission, a personal artistic mission.
Lawrence: Have you seen the awareness of the young people change in the last decade or so?
Terri Lyne: Yeah, I think it's a little different, of course, from when I was their age, and I think that they are more sensitive. In some ways it can worry me, or it can even frustrate me, because we're thinking you have to deal with stuff, you have to plow through, you have to be strong. But on the other hand, that can make for some great art.
I understand being scared. I was talking to a student not too long ago. They were talking about being scared about the climate and about global warming. I mean, those are real things, and I understand the fear behind all that. It's a lot to deal with. But at the same time, Buddhism says, "Suffer what there is to suffer and enjoy what there is to enjoy, but always remain faithful."
Suffering and joy are just two parts of life, so let's not get attached to one or the other. That's how I try to live. I think that this generation is also more in tune with some of this social justice work, but that's always been the case. It's always the younger generations that are on the front lines of social justice work, but they also need guidance from people that have more experience in certain ways.
Lawrence: I'm curious about your experience being the lyricist for this record—putting words in people's mouths and hearing them.
Terri Lyne: I have always liked to write songs. I've been doing it for at least thirty years. It's just a craft that's gotten better with time. One thing on my bucket list would be a book of poetry.
Also, I have to write speeches and things like that fairly regularly. So I think I've just developed a way with words, and I am somewhat clear on what I want to say when it comes to the music and these albums. It's a very satisfying feeling to do that, because of course I play drums, but that's satisfying in a different way. I compose music, which is extremely satisfying. But then also writing texts is satisfying in a different way. So I realized that all these things just make up the whole of me, and it's difficult to actually separate them. If somebody told me I had to just do one for the rest of my life, that would be very frustrating.
Lawrence: Could you pick?
Terri Lyne: Let's see. Wow. I would have to think about that, to see what would have the most impact, because at the end of the day, that's what I want to do. If I had to pick one, I'd have to try to figure out which part of me would have the most impact on my community. So at this moment, I don't know which that would be.
Lawrence: I'm really interested in "Riddim Song" and the different languages used. How do you evaluate a vocal take when you don't know what fidelity the words are being adhered to?
Terri Lyne: I evaluate it as if I do know what it means, because I'm not necessarily evaluating the meaning. I'm evaluating the emotion and how it strikes—assuming, if it's a language I don't know, and it's people that I trust, that the words are just fine.
But I'm trying to make it have an emotional feeling, because I feel music that I don't understand the language of. I really enjoy producing, and in fact I think that would have to be the one I would pick. If I had to pick one thing, it would be producing, because I like to see a vision through from its inception to the end. And that's what producing music, or producing anything, really is.
Lawrence: You mentioned the word trust. There's a lot of trust expressed through this record—the lyrical interpreters, your collaboration with Morgan Guerin. Do you start from a position of the trust is there for you to lose, or does somebody have to earn it?
Terri Lyne: I think that's a philosophical approach to many things, not just music. I think you meet people and you can either trust them right away, or you could make them earn your trust. I'm the kind of person that waits for somebody to show me that they're not trustworthy, and I give people the benefit of the doubt when I need them.
Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter say, "We don't play music, we play life." So I try to adopt that as well. And so, I won't say I trust to a fault, but people can sometimes do more than they think they can, which sometimes is great for them because it pulls more out of them, but then creates headaches for me down the road.
I've noticed that as a theme. I'll call somebody to do something, and maybe I don't even give them enough direction because I think they're going to get it, or interpret it in the way I think they should. Then I realized, okay, I have more work to do. I think it's a good thing, though, because it's faith. It's faith in the human spirit. Faith in them to aspire to do well. And then sometimes it just doesn't work out.
Lawrence: There is something very positive about you and your work, even though there's some heavy stuff on this record. How do you stay away from both denial and the heaviness, the weight of some of these topics? Is it innate to you, or are you developing these tools for yourself?
Terri Lyne: We are all evolving. That's part of life. I wasn't the same person ten years ago or twenty years ago as I am now. When you start getting into these important matters regarding social justice issues, there's so much to learn. You have to come to it with a certain kind of humility, because it just keeps expanding these various intersections, like concentric circles. It's never like, "Oh, I got this." When I started the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, I could barely talk about it because I hadn't done a lot of studying, but I knew that it was needed.
First thing you do is create a space, and people will come to it, and the knowledge will come, and things will evolve, and you have to be okay with that. You can't be afraid to do something because you don't know enough about it. You have to be able to just jump into something and learn as you go too.
So the biggest overlapping concentric circles, if you will, for me would be race and gender. Then if you look at the climate and global warming, that's something that affects us all. So of course that's part of my experience, and my way to connect with others too. I feel like none of us are monoliths when it comes to these things.
I don't have to be an expert on it to have a slant on it, to have an opinion on it. And I think for me, it should not get too heavy. I like joy, I like celebration, I like having a good time. That's a huge part of me. So that's going to come through probably first and foremost. I stop watching the news because I don't want to be bombarded with heaviness.
Lawrence: Tell me about "Solidarity Song." Tell me about exploring sides of an argument that you may not necessarily agree with, without it becoming ridicule.
Terri Lyne: Matt Stevens had that guitar riff—he would play it at our soundchecks—and I just felt like I wanted to do something with it. Even though it's kind of a country-style guitar lick, it also points to the blues, and I feel like the blues is foundational to everything.
The idea came to have these two supposed opposing sides kind of hash it out a little bit. I was hoping that nobody would be offended. But I mean, there's other forms, right? Like theater and poetry, and of course comedy, that use these tools—satire, humor, and exaggeration—to make their point. The whole time, the goal was for these people who seemed so different to come together and say, maybe we have a common foe we can unite against, and maybe we've been distracted by all these things going on around us. And maybe that was the plan all along, to distract us.
Lawrence: There's a lot of trite clichés about greed and capitalism in music, and a lot of it's true. How have you experienced, and how do you reconcile and navigate, the business side of the music business?
Terri Lyne: We have to keep educating ourselves, empowering ourselves. And unfortunately for jazz musicians and people like myself, we don't have these massive teams behind us working with us, so we have to take care of ourselves.
I talk a lot about the business side of things with students and young musicians that I work with, in hopes that they start to understand and tune into these things earlier than I did, because being an independent artist is kind of what is expected now. Whereas before, people were much quicker to hand their career over to somebody to manage. To allow a label to be—I don't know—it feels more like a plantation owner. These labels, they invest some money in you, but then they want to own you. Now, with how much independent music has taken over, labels have to partner with artists, as opposed to these kinds of antiquated deals where they own your music. People aren't doing that anymore.
So that shifted the game. Most everybody I know owns their publishing, their masters. Or you might do something radical. I did, for the first Social Science album—I gave the album to the label that put it out. Meaning I didn't accept an advance, because whatever money they were going to give me, I wanted them to put it into marketing. And I wanted to be able to just do it, because it was just something I wanted to do. Like, "You know what, I'm not even going to take any money for this. Let's see what you can do with that. Let me flip this model. No, you're not going to own it, but I'm going to give it to you without a license advance, to see really where your heart is with how you invest in it."
Lawrence: How would you characterize that experiment with giving the license with no upfront cost? Did your hypothesis play out?
Terri Lyne: I don't even know if I had much of a hypothesis. I was just saying, "Let me just do something different and see how this works." Because I could afford to, on that record.
People want these big advances, but they don't understand that streaming has made it a lot harder for labels to make money from the sale of a product. When we only had an album, you would put it out there, people would buy it, and then they have it in their collection and can listen to it whenever they want. So the sales at the beginning are bigger, and it just keeps going down as time goes on.
But with streaming, people stream whenever they want to hear it. So the streaming doesn't work like that. It doesn't go down if you have a good record. Streaming stays more consistent over time, so it's going to take ten years to make any money off streaming. Obviously, what they pay artists and labels for streaming is really bad, but you have to understand that it's still going to be more consistent over time.
Lawrence: I want to ask you about the drums. I'm curious about your relationship with the drums right now. Where are you at as a drummer? Are you still a drummer?
Terri Lyne: That's such an interesting question. I don't know if you've read something that made you ask that, or if that was just intuitive. I'm a frustrated drummer. I do so many different things that the one thing that's kind of suffered over the years is my drumming, because I really am into all these other things that I do, and you can't do everything and still do one thing at the level that you would do it if that's the only thing you did.
I see so many amazing drummers, and I know that they practice hours and hours a day, and they develop something, and their focus is that. I love the drums—which is something new that I'm saying, because I've done a lot of interviews where I've said, "I don't love the drums. I like the drums, but I don't love them."
They're not the first thing that comes to my mind. Music comes first—melodies, harmonies, songs, all of that—and then the drums. I don't start hearing a song and then hearing what the drums do. In fact, I can listen to songs and not know what the drums do, and then if I have to play it, I have to really go back and kind of listen to what the drums are doing. So it's just not my focal point. The overall music and presentation is.
So I've just been frustrated over the last several years, because there's just been less and less time to put toward that. So I have a dream, to quote Martin Luther King, that some of these other things will subside a bit and I'll be able to just practice and focus on the drums. Really let my playing evolve, because right now my playing is—I don't know if it's stagnant, even though I feel like I'm evolving mentally.
And of course all that is informing my play, but I haven't been able to sit down and work any of it out. So when I'm able to do that, I feel like there's going to be a new me on the instrument.
Lawrence: I was looking at your website, and there's a photo section, and the photos of you at the drums in performance are so expressive. You can see the joy in the player. If you're ever wrestling with how you feel about the drums, I would say look at those pictures.
Terri Lyne: I appreciate that. Actually, I will do that. Because even when you just said it, I thought, "Ooh, I have to go look at them." Because I feel like maybe that will remind me of something else. So I'm glad you said that. That's really intuitive.
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