Terri Lyne Carrington—Faculty

Terri Lyne Carrington ‘83 is a multiple Grammy Award-winning drummer,
composer, and producer. In 1989, Carrington released a Grammy-
nominated debut CD titled Real Life Story, featuring Carlos Santana,
Grover Washington Jr., Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, and other luminaries.
Carrington’s production and songwriting collaboration with Dianne
Reeves culminated in Reeves’s CD, Beautiful Life, which garnered
Carrington a production Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal CD in 2014. Other highlights of
Carrington’s life and work include playing with Herbie Hancock on his Grammy Award-
winning CD Gershwin’s World. Carrington released The Mosaic Project in 2011. The critically
acclaimed CD, which won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, gathered a myriad of
voices and crystallized them into a multifaceted whole. She produced the 14-song set,
which featured some of the most prominent female jazz artists of the last few decades:
Esperanza Spalding, Dianne Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sheila E., Nona Hendryx, and
several others. Carrington 2013 Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue earned her a Grammy
for Best Jazz Instrumental Album and established her as the first woman to ever win in this
category. Carrington gained recognition on late-night TV in the late ‘80s as the house
drummer for the Arsenio Hall Show, then again in the ‘90s as the drummer on the Quincy
Jones late-night TV show VIBE. She serves as the Zildjian Chair in Performance at Berklee's
Global Jazz Institute.

 

Danny Rivera—Guest Artist

They call Danny Rivera the “the national voice of Puerto Rico,” but his
magnificent, passionate way of singing is known and loved all over the
Spanish-speaking world. In Latin America, he's been a familiar face on

television since 1968. Over the course of a career that reached its 50th
year in 2015, he’s recorded more than 70 albums and is the only Puerto
Rican to star at Carnegie Hall over four different decades (1979, 1989,

 

1999, 2010).

Rivera was born of humble origins in one of the deepest Afro-Rican culture zones—
Santurce, Puerto Rico, home to many of the island’s most popular musicians and now part of
the modern metropolitan area of San Juan. Born on February 27, 1945, in the neighborhood
of 23 Abajo, named for one of the stops on a now-defunct trolley line, his first experiences
with singing were with the chorus of an evangelical church, in the bars of his neighborhood,
and with the barriles (barrel drums) of the streetside bomba that is Puerto Rico’s strongest link
to the era of plantation slavery.

Rivera made his first professional impression as a big-band singer in 1968, in the Hotel
San Juan with César Concepcion’s orchestra, the finest of its day. Televised music festivals
are important talent showcases in Latin America, and after Rivera was chosen as Revelation
of the Year in the 1968 Popularity Festival, he became a familiar face in Puerto Rico
through television appearances. With a repertoire that emphasized the bolero and looked
to progressive song movements, he was an emblematic figure of the bohemia of the 1970s
that based itself at the Ocho Puertas (Eight Doors) nightclub in Viejo, San Juan.