UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington will lead a live band in a reimagining of songs from the “free” jazz era and “Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” during a Center for the Performing Arts concert on Penn State's University Park campus.
“We Insist! 2025,” starring the four-time Grammy Award-winning musician and featuring vocalist Christie Dashiell, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5, in Eisenhower Auditorium. Morgan Guerin, Milena Casado and Matt Stevens, all featured on the 2025 recording, also will perform.
Roach’s 1960 release, selected in 2022 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry, is seminal to the social justice movements of the 1960s, Carrington said in a Center for the Performing Arts interview.
“That was always one of my favorite records of his,” she said in a recent online staff visit. “And we had a lot of things to talk about here in 2025, so I thought it would be great to look back and reimagine that album, and also make it, more current, so to say.”
Call 814-863-0255 or visit “We Insist! 2025” online for more information and to purchase tickets.
What to expect from a Terri Lyne Carrington performance
Roach’s recording became avant-garde and protest music of the civil-rights era, the Carrington-Dashielle tribute calls on his legacy while expanding its sonic palette with hints of gospel, neo-soul, funk, Afro-Latin, West African traditions and blues.
“When you play music, your humanity is what touches other people. And it’s stuff that you can't really put into words. Angela Davis, I think, says it best, that music allows us to feel the things that we can’t yet put into words,” Carrington said.
“I was sitting in with the infamous Wayne Shorter Quartet,” she said. “He said, ‘I want us to play in a way that if there’s a woman in the audience that’s in an abusive relationship, that she has the courage to leave.’”