Terri Lyne Carrington & Christie Dashiell: We Insist 2025!

Featuring Weedie Braimah, Milena Casado, Morgan Guerin, Simon Moullier, and Matthew Stevens

$45 general public, free for Goucher students, faculty and staff.

WE INSIST 2025! has just been nominated for a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album 2026!

We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, the groundbreaking 1960 collaboration between legendary jazz drummer Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown Jr., stands as a defining artistic statement of the Black American civil rights movement.

With a career defining performance by the incomparable Abbey Lincoln, and dynamic contributions from jazz greats Coleman Hawkins, and Booker Little, We Insist! stands as one of the most powerful and enduring statements of music as protest—within jazz and beyond. Recognized by the Library of Congress and cited among the most essential jazz recordings in history, its impact remains as vital and urgent today as it was when it was released in 1960.

We Insist 2025! is an extraordinary reimagining of Roach’s classic LP. It comes to us from NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington, one of the finest jazz drummers and producers of her generation, and vocalist Christie Dashiell, whose brilliant work is at the nexus of all the various branches of great Black music. In a way that both honors Roach’s original masterpiece and furthers Carrington’s passion for using jazz in the fight for social justice, We Insist 2025! feels like a perfect work of protest for our current moment.

Fittingly, this homage is, like Roach’s original, a Candid Records release, and bursts with fiery, stirring ideas and performances, as well as unstoppable grooves and the spellbinding interplay that only remarkable jazz musicians can deliver. With Roach and Brown’s compositions alongside original music and words by Carrington and her collaborators, We Insist 2025! runs the emotional gamut, from anger to tenderness to love and spots of delightful humor—a crucial reminder that, no matter what governments and institutions attempt, they cannot prevent us from celebrating our lives.

The program, full of arrangements crafted with a “community spirit,” says Carrington, is at once wide-ranging and deftly consistent in its aesthetic. “Driva’man” is propelled by nimbly swinging Afrofunk, while “Freedom Day (Part 1)” is reflective neo-soul. Two rhythm-first exercises in drums and spoken word, “Boom Chick” and “Dear Abbey,” give respect to the originators.

On “Freedom Is…,” Carrington’s free verse surveys the victories, both trivial and crucial, that occur in modern life during those rare moments when prejudice or patriarchy or oppression isn’t looming. The results are, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. “I set out to make an album that not only somehow captures the spirit of resistance, but that also acknowledges joy as a form of protest,” Carrington explains. “Maintaining joy can be an important part of being free, and the unapologetic expression of joy is a form of resistance to oppression.”

Carrington also works here to fulfill Roach’s pan-African vision, one that encompasses and connects all the rich strains of music that descend from the Mother Continent. “In making this album, it really felt like, yes, we’re dealing with the things that were happening in the states in 1960, many of which are still happening,” Carrington explains. “But we’re also dealing with elevating a global musical diaspora, which is something Max worked toward—with influences not only from jazz and improvised music, but from gospel and spirituals to soul and Afro-Cuban music.”

Dashiell, whose 2023 album Journey In Black earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Jazz Album at the 67th Grammy Awards, is equally passionate about the project. She sees it as both a reflection of history and a call to action. “This piece is as timely as ever and I'm grateful Terri Lyne had the foresight to re-imagine it during a time like this” she says. Adding, “Abbey Lincoln’s fearlessness and authenticity has inspired me for many years. Admittedly, I was nervous to take on the task of singing this music, but through recording these iconic melodies and lyrics, I tapped into a fearlessness and freedom of my own.”

Carrington connected with Dashiell after searching “for someone who could sing this message authentically, with a jazz pedigree, but with the ability to transcend genre.” Joining them in this mission is “a distinctive and varied cast of characters, with racial diversity and gender diversity among the artists,” Carrington adds. Her fantastic working band comprises percussionist Weedie Braimah, trumpeter Milena Casado, multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin, vibraphonist Simon Moullier and guitarist Matthew Stevens. 

In so many ways, it seems as if We Insist 2025! is the recording that Terri Lyne Carrington has been working toward throughout her entire historic career. Famously, Carrington hit the jazz scene as a child, earning buzz as a drum prodigy. Whenever Roach toured through her home town of Boston, he’d have Carrington sit in. Once, when he included her in a multi-artist showcase of drum greats, he insisted that Carrington take the last and most momentous slot in the drum-off. Later, he tried to get Carrington signed as a teenager to Blue Note Records, expressing interest in producing her. “I felt like he was proud of me,” she says. “I think he saw my potential. And that kind of support really gives you wind beneath your wings.”

You could argue that Carrington followed Roach’s example in the years to come. Not only has she been an invaluable mentor to generations of jazz phenoms, but she has also, as Roach did, focused on jazz’s ability to educate and uplift. To name a few examples among many, her group Social Science has used jazz and contemporary music to explore issues of race, gender and sexual identity. Prior to that, her Grammy-winning Mosaic Project celebrated womanhood through improvised music. She is also the founder of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at Berklee College of Music.

What’s more, We Insist 2025! isn’t the first time Carrington has honored jazz history and culture by engaging directly with a canonical record. In 2014, she became the first woman to receive the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, for the album Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, a revisiting of the monumental meetup between Roach, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Her recent New Standards project, also a Grammy winner, asks why the jazz repertoire is dominated by male composers, and expands the Real Book to underscore the music of female composers.

Despite her success, Carrington says she’s “looking for a day when I can retire, in a sense, from this kind of work”—when incisive explorations of racism and patriarchy will no longer be necessary. But for now, of course, that simply isn’t the case, and the meld of civil-rights mettle and African-rooted grooves that define We Insist 2025! is very much needed. “I feel that the music and themes on the album are poignant and that Max, Abbey and Oscar are smiling,” Carrington concludes.