If you haven’t already had the chance to catch a performance with the Bucknell University Jazz Band, then I’m here to tell you that you should absolutely add them to your bucket list!
On Wednesday, March 22nd the Bucknell jazz band joined American jazz drummer, composer, producer, and educator Terri Lyne Carrington for four pieces from Carrington’s own “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women Composers.” This project in particular was inspired by her founding of the Berklee Institute Of Jazz And Gender Justice, which she described during her conversation with Mikkel Vad, Professor of Music, as a space where women, non-binary, and male musicians “exhausted by the hypermasculinity they encounter in jazz culture” are welcome to “let their hair down, learn, [and] make mistakes.” This Institute is important not only because it offers an affinity space for non-male musicians, but specifically because it aims to provide women instrumentalists with access to performance opportunities they typically don’t get in the industry. Carrington summarized this disparity in access as an “[u]nspoken narrative that men play with music and women sing it.”
Upending this narrative is what Carrington believed to be the future of jazz, and its legacy; a jazz where more than male musicians and instrumentalists make up the musical canon and where the playing style of women aren’t squashed or rendered “taboo.” The future of jazz, she shared, also includes the fusion of the genre with others like rap, R&B, or afrobeats! “There’s a whole sound in the music that has not been fully explored yet” and Terri Lynn Carrington is certain that this new legacy of jazz embraces it all.
– Ninah Jackson ’25
