About this episode

Terri Lyne Carrington discusses the connection between rhythm, freedom, and jazz as a form of liberation theology.

What is it about rhythm that dissolves separation and draws us into a shared pulse? At the heart of this episode lies a quiet but unshakable conviction: that every life, every struggle, every creative breakthrough, is a quest for freedom. Few voices today carry that conviction with more authority than Terri Lyne Carrington, four-time Grammy winner, NEA Jazz Master, and one of the most vital figures in music of our time. In this conversation, she traces the search for freedom from its deepest roots to its most urgent expressions in the present. It begins with a child at a drum kit, and a family sensing something uncanny, a story that reaches back across generations, and across oceans, to a lineage in which rhythm was never only sound, but memory, identity, and a spiritual code passed through the hands of those entrusted to keep it alive. From there, Terri takes us into what jazz truly is at its core: a kind of liberation theology. Born of displacement and oppression, it became a communal act of survival, intellectual, radically creative, radically free. And it is in that freedom, expressed through improvisation, that something remarkable happens: boundaries begin to stretch, time…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Cecilia Ponce Rivera

Guest: Terri Lyne Carrington

Topics covered

• rhythm
• freedom
• jazz
• music history
• improvisation
• identity

Keywords

• rhythm
• freedom
• jazz
• improvisation
• music history
• identity
• cultural heritage

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice

Books & works: jazz

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