Cornerstone Conversation with Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Advisory Board: June 9, 2021

Abstract

Cornerstone Conversation with Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Advisory BoardJune 9, 2021 Angela Y. Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Carrie Mae Weems, Gina Dent, Romi Crawford, Moderator, and Nichole Rustin, Respondent Before Romi Crawford begins the discussion with the advisory board, she asks Terri Lyne Carrington to describe the beginnings of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. terri lyne carrington. I noticed there was a problem and I finally stepped in and did what I could. And I hadn’t been doing that all along for some reason. I was caught up with being a creative musician and my career. And then one day I met with some students, and they expressed that there was not a space for them in the college where they felt safe and nurtured and all the things that I felt coming up, even from my teachers. So, I just woke up one day and thought, well, the very least I can do is to try and create a space here, and it just grew from there. I had a conversation with Angela [Davis] and Gina [Dent] about it, and Angela pointed out that “justice” needed to be in the title, and we went from there. We have six ensembles, a liberal arts class, our students have traveled to do performances, and we have a book that we’ve been working on that will be coming out early next year of compositions by women composers.1 There’s corrective work involved, and we’re just trying to keep the conversation moving forward. There’s a lot of young men who gravitate to our Institute, because they recognize that gender justice is their job, too. I think these young men feel that they’ve had to perform a certain [End Page 10] kind of masculinity that seems to be natural or normal on the jazz stage and in jazz culture. A lot of young men are rejecting that. carrie mae weems. Thank you for inviting me to participate. I know about these early conversations. I was just listening to the radio on the way home, dashing home, listening to field recordings of East Indian men. And even within that context of rural music and doing recordings, and they were calling it a “search for the blues,” a sort of authentic, East Indian music, even within that context, out of all the people that they recorded they only recorded a single woman’s voice. A single woman’s voice. I was thinking about this in relationship to Terri and her breadth of work and the depth of her work. I met Terri through her work with the incredible pianist whom we’ve lost, Geri Allen. All of us were very close with Geri. And then I met Esperanza Spalding through Terri. I’ve met a number of really important women musicians and artists through Terri. And one of the things I see Terri doing is really widening the path for us. Laying down herself for us. We are gathered here today because she brought us together yet again, and that’s a part of her ongoing dynamic activism, to bring us together in all these various ways. It means a great deal. Because men take up an extraordinary amount of space. They assume that they need to take up an incredible amount of space, unlike women, who assume that the space for them is limited. And so how we flex out of that, how we use our skill, our voice, our language, our activism, our practice, to break open those boundaries is absolutely key and absolutely brutal at the same time. I have lots of scars from doing this sort of heavy lifting. romi crawford. It would be wonderful to know how others of you came to this project with Terri Lyne. Angela, Farah, Gina—what is your story? angela davis. First of all, thank you Terri, Aja, and everyone involved in the creation of this symposium, and thank you Carrie Mae for the wonderful introductory remarks. You know, let me just say that I’m still thinking about the panel that preceded us and the ways in which Daphne [Brooks], Jayna [Brown...