'New Standards' exhibit at Carr Center throws down the gauntlet on gender roles in jazz
In 2018, when Terri Lyne Carrington founded a Boston institute dedicated to gender justice in the jazz world, she was just getting started.
Now the acclaimed jazz drummer is set to premiere “New Standards,” a multipronged musical and visual installation at Detroit’s Carr Center, where she has served as artistic director for five years. The ambitious project is rife with national potential, and museum officials from across the U.S. are expected to be on hand for this week’s opening.
Like much of Carrington’s work in recent years, the project makes equity and inclusion its lodestar, seeking to empower women in a jazz scene long dominated by men.
“New Standards,” which takes its name from a recent Carrington book and album of that title, is the first in a series of four installations she’s calling “Shifting the Narrative: Jazz and Gender Justice.” The work aims to spotlight and elevate the historic role and future potential of women in jazz — as musicians, producers and promoters.
For the Carr Center, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary as a presenter of African American arts, the project also serves as an unveiling of its new Performance Studio, a 2,500-square-foot space coming together at the historic Park Shelton in Midtown.
Construction on the space was scheduled to wrap up in the spring, but supply-chain issues and other pandemic-related delays have pushed completion to early 2023. Still, the studio is well enough along to host “New Standards,” touted by Carrington as a narrative-shifting project.
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“We’ve accepted this is what jazz is without challenging that. It’s remarkable it’s gone this long without being seriously challenged,” Carrington said of the status quo. “It seems like so much of the community has been OK with the way things have been without really thinking about the potential of the music and how much more beautiful it could be.”
The launch of “New Standards” is teeming with parts:
? The Carr Center installation, premiering Friday, includes visual works by jazz creators such as Cécile McClorin Salvant, who contributed three ink-on-paper pieces inspired while listening to songs by female artists. Also featured are a pair of 7-foot sculptures by Carmen Lundy and a stylized Ella Fitzgerald fashion work from Jazzmeia Horn.
A sound exhibit, “Truth Be Told,” includes excerpts from oral histories of artists such as Alberta Hunter and Melba Liston, while works by visual artists including Monica Haslip, Joe Diggs, Yesim Tosuner and Ramesess are featured. Portraits of women instrumentalists by photographer Sherry Rubel are on exhibit.
Carrington herself contributes painted drumsticks and drumheads along with a sneak peek of her forthcoming children’s book, “Three of a Kind,” inspired by her musical trio work with Geri Allen and Esperanza Spalding. She’s also featured in a film documenting the “New Standards” project.
? A Friday night panel, “Jazz and Gender: Forging a New Legacy,” will feature a rare Detroit visit from Black activist and scholar Angela Davis, speaking alongside Carrington and professors Gina Dent and Robin D.G. Kelly.
? A five-night walking Jazz Crawl will feature more than a dozen performances at eight venues in Midtown Detroit. The concert crawl — happening Friday and Saturday and resuming Oct. 20, 21 and 28 — was inspired by a jazz party-bus event Carrington attended in Los Angeles.
The installation benefited from a $200,000 grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, awarded to the Carr Center in 2020.
It piggybacks on the September publication of “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers,” a collection of sheet music compiled by Carrington to challenge traditional notions of the jazz canon. The book, which features a century’s worth of compositions, was accompanied by the release of the album “New Standards Vol. 1,” with Carrington leading an ace band through 12 of the pieces.
The flurry of work manifests a mission Carrington undertook in 2018, when she founded the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at Boston’s Berklee College of Music — the prestigious school where the drummer landed a scholarship at a precocious age 11. The institute’s founding was inspired in part by conversations with Davis, a longtime friend.
Carrington had made her musical mark the old-fashioned way, touring with the likes of Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and operating within the traditional jazz corridors. It was a world the assertive, confident young drummer found easy to navigate, even as a female musician.
“I’m somebody who wasn’t intimidated by men, and I held my own. I could hang out and out-hang,” she said with a laugh. “My thoughts and opinions were always known. So in that world, I functioned in essence like one of them. But why should it be only a certain type of woman who makes it in jazz?”
Carrington, 57, said she spent her early creative years “trying to sound like the next guy.” With the new book, album and installation, she’s hoping to shift the consciousness for the female jazz players following in her wake.
And because the current generation of young musicians is progressive on so many cultural and social fronts, she has hope in her quest: “I’m excited about the current generation that’s thinking differently, and we’ll see where this thing goes.”
That includes the prospect of reshaping the very sound of jazz music.
“We have to start being open to a sound that might be different, that different bodies could produce in jazz — a sound that has not really been so prevalent,” Carrington said. “We don’t know what it will sound like when that kind of representation happens. Most woman who have been successful in jazz have done it by imitating or competing with a sound produced by men.
“Maybe nothing will change,” she continued. “But if people feel supported and have access and there is true equity in the creation of the music, I’d have to think a different aesthetic would emerge.”
Carrington has served as organization’s artistic director since 2017, succeeding close friend and collaborator Geri Allen, the Detroit jazz luminary who died that year.
For Carr Center President and CEO Oliver Ragsdale Jr., the appointment of Carrington came with big hopes. “New Standards,” he said, exceeds expectations while ticking off each of the themes in the institution’s tagline: “Inspire. Entertain. Challenge. Educate.”
“It pushed her creativity, and it pushed our organization. Our hope was to elevate another step or two starting with Geri and then Terri Lyne,” said Ragsdale. “This is just a whole other level. When you look at all the parts, it’s really what the Carr Center is about: a multidisciplinary organization that strives for and delivers excellence.”
'New Standards'
Multimedia installation curated by Terri Lyne Carrington
Friday-Nov. 27
Carr Center Performance Studio
15 E. Kirby, Detroit
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: New Carr Center exhibit throws down a gauntlet on jazz's gender roles