Terri Lyne Carrington Beats Her Own Drums

Everything seems to be coming together for Terri Lyne Carrington.

She has played with the giants of the jazz and contemporary music worlds. Some of them--Wayne Shorter, Grover Washington, Patrice Rushen, John Scofield, Gerald Albright--are guests on her debut album for Verve/Forecast Records, “Real Life Story,” due out this week. She has a steady job five nights a week in the Hollywood-based band on Arsenio Hall’s TV talk show.

For the 23-year-old drummer-singer-composer it’s a rewarding list of credits in a career that began before she reached her teens.

Soft of voice, cool of manner, Terri Lyne (rhymes with win ) talked the other day about the curious accident that led her to the drums.

“I started on saxophone,” she said, “playing my father’s horn, but then my teeth fell out, so I switched to drums. I was 7.”

The drums, inherited from a grandfather, were in the Carrington home in Medford, Mass., the Boston suburb where she was born Aug. 4, 1965. “My father could play drums too, and he was my first teacher. Then I had private lessons with Keith Copland and Alan Dawson, who were both also teachers at the Berklee College of Music.”

Sitting in with visiting notables became a life style: she shook a tambourine with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, sat in on drums with Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry.

“Clark was a great help. When I was 10 he took me to the Wichita Jazz Festival as his special guest. When I was 12, Buddy Rich heard me and got me on the ‘To Tell the Truth’ show. All through high school, I was playing gigs on the side with people like Kenny Barron, Frank Foster, George Coleman.”

Graduating from high school a year early, she promptly enrolled at Berklee College of Music, expanding her horizons with the study of composing and arranging.

Restless and eager to take on bigger challenges than she could find in Boston, Carrington left Berklee after 18 months, headed for New York and found a ready market for her services. She worked off and on with Terry for a year, playing mainstream jazz; but she had arrived equipped for all contingencies.

“Straight-ahead music is a strong foundation for whatever you want to do, but I had been listening to a lot of contemporary stuff too, and wound up playing it. Wayne Shorter is contemporary--I was with him for a year or so, including three European tours--and so is David Sanborn; I worked with him all last summer.”

How does a teen-age wonder develop so much maturity and versatility? Carrington went through a series of listening stages: “I liked Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, Art Blakey, but I never tried to play like any of them.

“One of my big influences was (drummer-pianist-composer) Jack de Johnette, who’s a good friend of the family. He was never actually my teacher, but I used to go to his house a lot to just sit around and talk about music; I learned a lot from him. Today I’m listening to the contemporary drummers who are playing today’s music.”

Today’s music is clearly what Carrington had in mind when she recorded her album, co-produced with Robert Irving III, well known for his Miles Davis associations. “Real Life Story” introduces her in three roles: as drummer, composer or co-composer of all but two of the songs, and lead vocalist.

The basic performing group includes Patrice Rushen on keyboards, Keith Jones on bass and Don Alias on percussion; however, along the way, four guest saxophonists are heard from, as well as the guitarists Hiram Bullock and John Scofield. Carlos Santana plays lead guitar on “Human Revolution,” for which Dianne Reeves added some of the backup singing.

Carrington’s own singing, though not spectacular, is at least functionally agreeable in introducing some of her own material. “I’ve been singing off and on ever since I started making demo records of my songs,” she said. “I never studied singing, but after starting to realize I liked the way I sounded, I kept it up. On one cut, ‘More Than Woman,’ I sing two vocal tracks and Dianne overdubbed another.”

“Real Life Story” will no doubt make its way into the various radio formats, from contemporary jazz and adult alternative to album-oriented-rock and alternative rock. How much Carrington can promote it depends on her television schedule.

“I’m doing the (Arsenio Hall) show Mondays through Fridays, so I can’t go too far out in the promotion; however, maybe we’ll have a hiatus,” she said. “I’m committed to staying with the show indefinitely, and I’m enjoying it.”

Moving to the West Coast was not the result of Hall’s offer--she had planned it all along. “I had come out here to look for an apartment and buy a car,” Carrington said. “I like it out here; it’s closer to the environment I grew up with in Medford--that was suburban, and this is kind of suburban and relaxed. New York is so hard core, and I was getting very tired of that.”

After all her success, the gigs and sit-ins with Betty Carter and Stan Getz and Joe Williams and Oscar Peterson, Carrington is eager to continue learning, to meet new challenges.

Listening to a recent record by the drummer Dave Weckl, with Chick Corea’s trio, she said: “That represents an awesome kind of modern-day technique--makes me feel I should lock myself up in a closet and practice eight hours a day until I can play like that.

“I don’t like the way I played five years ago. Some people possibly liked me better when I was 17 or 18--that’s their taste. But if I kept on playing the same way, I would just be stagnant.”