At 11, Terri Lyne Carrington held a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music. This episode traces her from a Medford, Massachusetts home where her father led the Boston Jazz Society, through her grandfather Matt Carrington’s drum set at age seven, her Wichita Jazz Festival performance alongside Clark Terry, study with Alan Dawson, and the 1981 recording TLC and Friends with Kenny Barron, Buster Williams, and George Coleman.

We follow the push from mentor Jack DeJohnette to move to New York in 1983, work with Stan Getz, Lester Bowie, Pharoah Sanders, and Cassandra Wilson, her years as house drummer on The Arsenio Hall Show, and her Grammy-nominated 1989 debut Real Life Story. We then cover The Mosaic Project, her history-making Grammy for Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, and her institutional work at Berklee, including the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and the book New Standards.

• What time feel means and why locking in with Clark Terry at 11 was remarkable
• How she engineered her own escape from the child prodigy trap
• Why late-night house drumming was training for producing and bandleading
• The 1962 Ellington, Mingus, and Roach album she re-engineered and why that choice mattered
• How 101 lead sheets by women composers change what students put on their music stands