Throughout her 35-year recording career, virtuoso drummer, composer, and bandleader
Terri Lynne Carrington
has challenged assumptions. Her 2011
Mosaic Project
, performed by an all-female ensemble, critiqued jazz as a male-dominated art form while using misogyny as an underlying component of American culture. 2014's
Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue
paid tribute to the 50th anniversary of the
Duke Ellington
-
Charles Mingus
Max Roach
sessions for
United Artists
while taking on income inequality and late-stage capitalism.
The Waiting Game
is a double album that showcases the musical range of her new band,
Social Science
, as they engage enormous creativity and political protest. Its members include
Aaron Parks
(piano),
Matthew Stevens
(guitar),
Morgan Guerin
(bass and saxophone), vocalist
Debo Ray
, and DJ
Kassa Overall
. The first disc's 11 compositions deliver a head-on polemic on racism, homophobia, police brutality, prison conditions, gender discrimination, and more with assistance from several guests singing or speaking. Disc two is a sprawling four-part improvisational jazz suite called "Dreams and Desperate Measures" that adds
Esperanza Spalding
on upright bass, with strings, and winds orchestrated by
Edmar Colon
.
Disc one opens with "Trapped in the American Dream," with a manifesto narrated by
Overall
. A melancholy piano figure is repeated atop
Carrington
's restrained, martial snare, guest
Derrick Hodge
's bubbling electric bass, and
Stevens
' poignant single-string guitar playing.
Guerin
's saxophone solo moves the track beyond the emergent hip-hop frame and into elegant post-bop.
Ray
's operatic soprano winds in from the margins, adding drama and tension that is transformed into a meld of hip-hop and rock.
Nicholas Payton
and MC
Raydar Ellis
guest on "Pray the Gay Away," illuminated by
Colon
's arresting post-classical string charts. "No Justice for Political Prisoners" is a jazz ballad sung wordlessly by
MeShell Ndegeocello
. Its narration is filled in by vocal samples from justice warriors:
Assata Shakur
,
Angela Davis
Leonard Peltier
Laura Whitehorn
, and
Marilyn Buck
. The title track, composed just after the 2016 presidential election, evokes a general disappointment ("We'll suffer through/And rise again...") before becoming pointed and angry: ("â?¦The highest ceiling made of glass/Still unbrokenâ?¦"). Disc two's "Dreams and Desperate Measures" is a nearly 40-minute improvised jazz suite. The first movement emerges with speculative improv by
Spalding
and
Parks
; mournful classical strings are asserted, and funky blues and barely restrained post-bop collide inside the frame. "Part 2" commences with a three-chord piano pattern, some skittering brushed snare, and an elliptical string melody answered contrapuntally by
. It unfolds gently with guitars and piano before the strings move become more insistent in a minor-key, pulsing rhythm. The abstract "Part 3" reveals an advanced improvisational interplay at the heart of this ensemble's communication, while the final section initially continues that dialogue but transmutes into funky, spiky, jazz-rock with killer guitar work from
.
Waiting Game
is a major statement that speaks through the many articulations of jazz in the 21st century while rooting itself in harmonic discovery (particularly on disc two) and prescient cultural critique. ~ Thom Jurek