Jazz as Organizing: Music, Community, and Social Change

Today we have JJA president Howard Mandel hosting a compelling discussion on political activism in jazz with three remarkable musicians who have dedicated their careers to both artistic excellence and social change.

Our first guest is Terri Lyne Carrington, the four-time Grammy-winning drummer, composer, and producer who serves as Founder and Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. As an NEA Jazz Master and Doris Duke Artist, Terri Lyne has spent four decades advocating for women, transgender, and nonbinary musicians while reimagining jazz's aesthetic possibilities. Her recent work includes the acclaimed album "new STANDARDS vol.1," featuring compositions by women, and a powerful reconceptualization of Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln's "We Insist!" for the modern era.

Joining her is Orbert Davis, the Emmy Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and educator who co-founded the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. As host of "The Real Deal with Orbert Davis" on 90.9 FM WDCB, Orbert has built extraordinary cultural bridges through his "Immigrant Stories" concert series and groundbreaking collaborations with Cuban musicians. His work transforms jazz into a vehicle for international understanding and social healing.

Our third guest is Marc Ribot, the innovative guitarist whose extensive collaborations include work with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and John Zorn. Beyond his acclaimed recording career spanning over 25 albums, Marc has emerged as a fierce advocate for musicians' economic rights through his organizing work with the Content Creators Coalition and efforts to reform the American Federation of Musicians.

Together, these three artists explore what jazz activism means today—from challenging gender inequities and supporting immigrant communities to fighting for fair compensation and workers' rights. Their conversation reveals how jazz continues to serve as both artistic expression and instrument of social change.

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Transcript

Lawrence Peryer: Hello and welcome to the Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers, and broadcasters focused on jazz. I'm Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member and managing editor of the Buzz. Today we have JJA president Howard Mandel hosting a compelling discussion on political activism in jazz with three remarkable musicians who have dedicated their careers to both artistic excellence and social change.

Our first guest is Terri Lyne Carrington, the four-time Grammy-winning drummer, composer, and producer who serves as Founder and Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. As an NEA Jazz Master and Doris Duke Artist, Terri Lyne has spent four decades advocating for women, transgender, and nonbinary musicians while reimagining jazz's aesthetic possibilities. Her recent work includes the acclaimed album "new STANDARDS vol.1," featuring compositions by women, and a powerful reconceptualization of Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln's "We Insist!" for the modern era.

Joining her is Orbert Davis, the Emmy Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and educator who co-founded the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. As host of "The Real Deal with Orbert Davis" on 90.9 FM WDCB, Orbert has built extraordinary cultural bridges through his "Immigrant Stories" concert series and groundbreaking collaborations with Cuban musicians. His work transforms jazz into a vehicle for international understanding and social healing.

Our third guest is Marc Ribot, the innovative guitarist whose extensive collaborations include work with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and John Zorn. Beyond his acclaimed recording career spanning over 25 albums, Marc has emerged as a fierce advocate for musicians' economic rights through his organizing work with the Content Creators Coalition and efforts to reform the American Federation of Musicians.

Together, these three artists explore what jazz activism means today—from challenging gender inequities and supporting immigrant communities to fighting for fair compensation and workers' rights. Their conversation reveals how jazz continues to serve as both artistic expression and instrument of social change.

And now I bring you Howard Mandel, Terri Lyne Carrington, Orbert Davis, and Marc Ribot.

Howard Mandel: You all engage in something that could be considered activism—jazz activism—and let's start by defining the terms. Does that term "jazz activism" mean anything to you guys? Mark, can we start with you?

Marc Ribot: Let's chop it down even further to the term "activism."

There's a great essay by the activist Astra Taylor called "Against Activism." What she says, to make it short, is "I'm not an activist, I'm an organizer. You don't get points for being active. You get points for winning." To do that, we have to not just act blindly. We have to organize.

So I think, to get back to your question, there's a place for jazz and a lot of other types of organizing, and I hope we can shed some light on what that might be.

Howard Mandel: Thank you. Yes. Terri Lyne, what would you have to say about this?

Terri Lyne Carrington: Yes, I just agree with Mark. I don't particularly label myself anything. I think that we see what's needed, and if we have the courage and the time, we step in and we do what we can. I think it's just about respecting humanity—the humanity of others.

An organizer or an activist, I'm just trying to do something good.

Howard Mandel: Orbert, how do you look at this?

Orbert Davis: It's interesting. Years ago, there was a write-up in the Chicago Tribune, and I was described as a "jazz activist," and I never in a million years would've thought of myself as that.

I just do what I do, love what I do, and try to spread the joy. But that really was a turning point for me to understand that it's the effect of the music, the power of the music, and the power of the people that are organized around the music. Activism is an outcome, whether one is smart enough to see it and identify it or not.

Howard Mandel: The reason that I thought of all three of you is because you've been active and organized about addressing certain issues that are beyond the purely musical element of jazz. Orbert, with your Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, you've done a lot of work with Cuban students and gone to Cuba and really developed a fantastic relationship there.

Terri Lyne, you've really instituted an important center for thinking about and dealing with issues of jazz and gender complications. Mark, you've done music that is specifically about political subjects, as well as working to better the situation for musicians in payment situations with your Content Creators Coalition, among other things.

I know that this has been a central interest, and are there people that you look at in jazz prior to your work who are inspirations—have been inspirations about how they engage with social issues?

Orbert Davis: We can look historically. From Billie Holiday, Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Louis Armstrong, the moments when the music itself had to spread a message and kind of get people on track to understand certain things. Jazz activism has always been alive. There's so much more work to do, especially in our current situation that we find ourselves in.

Terri Lyne Carrington: I would say that so many people have inspired me in that way. Right now I'm thinking a lot about Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln because I reimagined their classic "We Insist!" album.

It's crazy that we're still talking about the same things that they were talking about in 1960. Some of the themes have changed, of course, but the foundation of what they were talking about is still relevant. That movie that came out—"Soundtrack to a Coup d'État"—it was just wild to see that scene where they went into the UN and where they were screaming, and Abbey and some other women were screaming. It was a very powerful scene to me because, as much as I don't put my body on the line as much as some of our predecessors have, I'm inspired by people that were willing to go to jail—that were willing to make much bigger sacrifices than I feel that I have.

Howard Mandel: It's interesting that the institution of Berklee College supports your endeavors in this regard, and that's a big change from historical jazz activism.

Terri Lyne Carrington: I just feel like we're at a time where these institutions really have to look at what's important to them. If a college like Berklee, which is the leading contemporary music college in the world, if they want to stay that way, they have to really address what's contemporary—the themes and the concerns of their students. I think they have the freedom to do more so than some institutions. So I don't think it was a big stretch necessarily to do it.

There was also a crisis at the college at the time with some accusations of sexual harassment and assault. I had been talking about this institute for a couple of years, but I think sometimes when there's crisis, there's also opportunity.

Howard Mandel: Mark.

Marc Ribot: If we're throwing names into the ring, I'm going to have to put in Bob Cranshaw—the late Bob Cranshaw—because I want to put him in because he was in a much more... I saw that film you mentioned, Terri. Was it "Prelude to a Coup" or was that the name of it?

That scene was amazing where they rushed the UN. It was incredible. But also, I have to tell you, don't worry, Terri Lyne—we're all going to get a chance to be arrested, so don't feel bad. We don't need to feel any nostalgia for earlier periods of history the way things are going, unfortunately.

So Bob Cranshaw was, of course, a legendary jazz bass player, but he also... we can't treat jazz as something that's isolated from the larger world of the music industry. He made a lot of his bread by being in a television orchestra for what was that kids' show?

Sesame Street. Yeah. For years. What that meant was just a regular gig. He was still doing his jazz gigs at night and playing with everybody, but he lined up a pension that wound up getting him, I don't know, something—a serious amount of money every month. He used that ability when he got older.

He volunteered a lot of time to try to create a liaison toward jazz musicians and Local 802 of the AFM. Ultimately, despite what I have to say are his heroic efforts, this failed. Sure, there's a jazz committee and sure there's everything else, but the majority of jazz musicians—or the large majority of young musicians—don't know the union exists.

It has not... for those who record on major labels, we've benefited in a major way. For those who get the union gigs, there are major benefits. But for the average musician who's out there hustling—for the average student of yours, Terri Lyne, at Berklee, who's going to be out there hustling in a few years—it doesn't make any difference.

I mention that not to dis the union, but because I don't think we have to just accept that. I think there are things we can do.

Howard Mandel: The musicians' union has been a powerful force, not always progressive, I understand. Can you talk a little bit more about that, Mark? Because we think about the union as possibly being a center for activism in some way.

Marc Ribot: I'm sure that Orbert and Terri are aware that most of the union was segregated up until pretty late in the game.

When you see that word "amalgamated" in front of a union, it means that the black and white locals were merged by court order. In the case of the musicians' union, that didn't occur in some locals like LA until '68 or '69. So you're right—it has a very mixed history.

On the other hand, that led in Chicago and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and in a number of other cities to the creation of very strong black locals. When you talk to the older cats, there was some kind of mixture of fear and respect. In other words, these locals kept alive the idea that when you play a gig or make a record, you're supposed to get paid. When somebody shows up with a camera and wants to put it in a movie, you're supposed to get paid something else.

I can't remember the name of the author, but a book that was issued recently on jazz in Pittsburgh—"Jazz on the Hill"—talks a lot about that history. I think there are things that can be done to either demand that the AFM change the things that have prevented it from serving not only most jazz musicians, but most indie musicians—most of us who record for indie labels and work the recording-related touring circuits.

If they don't do it, we need to start our own union. I think we need a union.

Howard Mandel: So activism can be applied to everything from professional interests to international interests. Again, to go back to Orbert's work with the people from Cuba, maybe you could talk about how that was initiated, Orbert, and what some of the challenges have been.

Orbert Davis: It all started... the orchestra has been around for about twenty years now, which I'm every day surprised by because it's a labor of love. It's the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life because when you put an orchestra together, we need a composer—so guess who's the composer?

Howard Mandel: This is the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic you're talking about.

Orbert Davis: Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. We did the project in Poland, thanks to a dear friend of ours, Lauren Deutsch. We said, "This is pretty cool," because Chicago's been good to us, but we could only really afford to do one or two concerts a year because of the cost of using professional musicians and everything—speaking of the union.

But then we hit this thing in Poland that was like, "This is cool. Let's do this." A couple years later, we get the opportunity to go to Cuba. The thing about Cuba is I never realized that this experiment would transform my life and totally put me on the path of what we can call activism.

There's not a day that goes by without a conversation with—now—the hundreds of kids that have been through our program. I can't even call it a program. There are intersections, I'll put it that way.

To tell the story just very quickly: I'm a composer. I was commissioned to do a work with River North Dance, where Frank Chaves, who is the artistic director and choreographer, is Cuban American. He said he's always wanted to do a Cuban-American project.

We said, "Great, let's team up, but we got to go to Cuba." Definitely. While there, we visited the Universidad de las Artes, and that's when I first encountered these amazing students—just by working with one trumpet player in a room. Pretty soon, like fifty kids come running in, and we started jamming.

We just played "Night in Tunisia" for like an hour. As we left, we promised that we'd go back, and we happened to go back in December of 2014. Someone tapped me on the shoulder—a translator—and said, "Hey, there's something happening between our countries right now."

It was right when President Obama and Castro were announcing the normalization of relationships. So imagine: we go from strangers to becoming friends—really, enemies to becoming friends. That weekend, my business partner and co-founder—we were on "60 Minutes" with Scott Pelley because we were the only people with Cuban reaction.

But what happened in those rooms... and fortunately that happened at the beginning of the week, so we went through two or three days of rehearsal with this sense of celebration that what these kids' grandparents had hoped for, we were doing in the room.

Fortunately, because of having a great president who had vision—I'll say that—the next year we were able to bring thirty of those kids to Chicago to perform with the orchestra. We put together a hundred-piece orchestra at the Auditorium Theatre, and that alone changed so many lives.

So fast forward: I've been to Cuba about thirteen times since then. Just last January we performed—we put together another orchestra at the university and performed at the Havana Jazz Festival. But it's not as much about the performance as what happens in those rehearsals. That's where I've learned...

I myself—I'll start with me—I've learned so much about what it means to be human from the Cuban experience. Being an African American, I've learned to parallel the African American experience to the Afro-Cuban experience. There's so much richness that I could talk for six hours about it, but I'll just say that it's transformed me and it's transformed a lot of lives.

We just had a couple students come to Chicago and graduate to get their master's degree. That's been what—twelve years? And again, we're still family because of it.

Howard Mandel: That's fantastic. Thank you. So Terri Lyne, talk a little bit about what people involved in the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice go through and what are some of the issues that they're addressing, and some of the maybe victories or growth that you've seen?

Terri Lyne Carrington: We started off as really trying to serve students at Berklee because I was just starting to hear some stories that were very upsetting—people that were quitting that were very talented but just didn't have the support they needed from their professors. So that was the beginning. Then I realized what's really needed is a cultural shift.

We can change things within these walls here at Berklee, but it's really a cultural shift that's needed because for too long, women have not been supported. We've had extra burdens. You've had to be a certain kind of woman to succeed—one that plays just as good as the next guy. But that's not really inviting a different aesthetic into the music.

Jazz has always been aesthetically, sonically pretty hyper-masculine, and the successful women were the ones that were able to fit into that existing fabric and texture of the music. What we started asking is, "Wow, what would the music have sounded like? How would it have developed if the contributions of women were in the fabric of it from the beginning?"

Now we have an opportunity to open our ears and our minds to start to be able to possibly hear differently and feel a different presence in the music because, yes, we do have different experiences and different—just different feelings about things.

I think that voice is pretty void in the music if I'm speaking mostly about instrumental jazz, of course. Women have always been in the front singing, but that's been an unspoken narrative that women sing jazz and men play it. I have to look at—if I look at my career, I have to look at what did I squash in my own musical development and artistry in order to fit into what has been deemed great.

These are the things I would talk about when we had a trio with Geri Allen and Esperanza Spalding. Those are the things we started to talk about. Why did that trio feel different to us? To me it didn't feel any different because I was so acclimated to assimilating.

But Geri and Esperanza would talk about they felt something different because somehow they didn't feel as scrutinized, or they didn't feel these extra burdens and weights that we may carry in all-male situations. You're low-key always protecting yourself. Always socially fitting into something. You can't be too feminine, or you can't be too masculine. You have to walk this line of what's acceptable as a woman in a male-dominated space constantly.

I started thinking about all the women who don't have a personality like me and felt out of place or didn't feel like who they were authentically was really accepted. So those were the questions I had to start answering because if I wasn't trying to look at that, then I feel like I was part of the problem because I was regurgitating the same things—telling my female students, "No, just hit harder, play stronger. No, don't cry." All these things that you would tell a boy too, in general, because you have to be tough. You have to...

That doesn't mean you don't work hard. It just means let people come to the table as their authentic selves. Can we all just start to imagine a different aesthetic in the music? Not replacing anything, but adding something that could be valuable to the future of jazz and valuable in a sense of helping music reach its greatest potential.

Howard Mandel: Mark, I'm going to put you on the spot here because you've played in some pretty hyper-masculine ensembles—Jack McDuff, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and your own Ceramic Dog. Some pretty tough music. How do you see the cross-gender relations? We've seen so much development in feminism, post-modern feminism. How does this operate for you?

Marc Ribot: I think that I've started to become aware—and I thank Terri Lyne and others for making me more aware of the necessity of reconsidering all these things. I've been paying a lot of attention to some things in the music, but I may have neglected that.

In this most recent band, I just got off the road with Ava Mendoza, but I couldn't help but thinking... we shared a bill at San Sebastian Jazz Festival with Dee Dee Bridgewater and her band "We Exist," which is all—she was working with all female—and slamming, absolutely slamming. But I couldn't help but thinking that the entire next two bands, including a multi-artist night of flamenco music in which there are some amazing female musicians, but they were all male.

Again, it is not just the responsibility of women in music to try to make this change happen. I think it's all of our responsibility, and I think I need to do better.

Howard Mandel: You're not doing too bad. It's not like you're exploiting women, I don't think, with your music, and a lot of your repertoire really speaks to progressive causes or opposition to tyranny and bigotry.

Marc Ribot: I'll add to that. I think—since this seems to be my job on most panels—I need to point out that for both in terms of race and gender, we got to look at it intersectionally because there's a money issue involved.

I am conscious at every moment... when we created minimums at the Winter Jazz Festival, every time pay for an entry-level festival or a record goes up, every time the cost of producing a record goes down. In other words, because you get a record budget or you get fair treatment in producing a record, that enables more women and more black people and people of color who historically and economically have less family wealth than white males.

These issues are racial, and we can't... when I hear people say, "Man, just DIY, man, make your own record," I say that's cool if you have the money to make your own record. That's cool if you can not work for four months while you are writing, rehearsing, recording, mixing, editing, sequencing, doing the cover art for your record. But it's not cool if you don't.

Howard Mandel: Orbert recently produced a gala for the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, and the focus of the gala was Hazel Scott as one of the founders of Third Stream Music. This is, I think, part of the revelation—going back into our jazz history to see where the women and people who've been marginalized flourished and didn't necessarily get the attention that they might have if they didn't have the demographic that they did.

Orbert, will you talk a little bit more about Hazel Scott as an activist?

Orbert Davis: Wow. The first thing I have to say is that I never really heard of her until our executive director, Laura Rice, brought her to my attention. I've seen the videos of her playing two pianos—left hand, right hand piano—and also the classical pieces that she played.

But I never knew the depth of who she was musically, of course, because she was the first African American woman to have her own TV show. But then when I started digging deeper into who she was, her biographer Karen Chilton wrote an amazing book that hopefully will become a screenplay and a movie one day about her life.

But to know that she was the ultimate activist in the fact that she was married to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. And that put her in the limelight of social activism and racial equality, but also the fact that she was blending classical and jazz, which again was definitely unheard of.

The way that she got there was the fact that, I think it was Billie Holiday who referred her to play at a club. They were scrutinizing every piece that she wanted to play. They said, "Don't play that. Don't play that. No, you can't play that. You can't play that." But then she decided to start just by playing classical music and then changing it and started swinging and changing the form and the textures and whatnot.

That kind of became the person that she would become. Unfortunately, because of living in America at that time, she was ostracized and ended up having to move to Europe. That's where her career pretty much ended because that's when there was less emphasis on swing and more emphasis on bebop and smaller bands and things like that.

But it's time that she gets the recognition that she deserves.

Howard Mandel: I think that demonstrates how activism has always been implicit in jazz in some ways—the adaptation of materials, the absorption of materials, and then transformation of them through a personal perspective. As you say, she was actually persecuted by the Red Scare, by Joseph McCarthy's horrendous campaign in the early 1950s to root out what he thought was rebellious communism and all this scary stuff.

Orbert Davis: It's interesting—as Terri Lyne said earlier—it's hard to imagine that these very same things are happening today.

Howard Mandel: Okay, so what more can we do about it? Have you talked to colleagues? Are you trying to, or do you see that there's more of a sense of urgency to address social issues amongst your musician colleagues now?

Orbert Davis: Not to be afraid of being silenced—just continue to do what we do. I always tell them to listen with their eyes and to look with their ears, and that tells them everything they need to know.

Terri Lyne Carrington: As far as how we perpetuate our work with these causes, I feel doing things like this, of course, is super important—not just for what we're talking about that others can hear, but also as a learning and expansion, a way of expanding for ourselves. For instance, Mark just mentioned this union thing in California, and you said the late sixties, because my grandfather and my father were in the Black Union in Boston, and I just looked it up and that didn't merge until 1970, which really just blew my mind because they've talked about it.

I thought just by listening to my dad talk that this was something that was way before my time. I joined the union—I was the youngest person to join the union at ten years old. So that was just five years after they merged. So these kinds of conversations are so important, just for our own education.

For me, of course, you can formalize things if you're working with an institution, but grassroots is always important, always a big part of it, and it's collective work. No one person or organization has a handle on it or does the most—everybody has to do something for something to actually shift.

But I think one of my strengths is just talking about what I believe in to other colleagues—male and female colleagues. Because when I talk to somebody, there's really no way they can't see what I see. I mean that—it's never happened. Of course, maybe people reject what I'm saying behind my back.

There's many women that have really—how do I say—just bought... drank the Kool-Aid, bought into things that have been systemic. We get used to how things are. So women have been not brainwashed but just accepting of the idea that they shouldn't talk about this because they want to be considered equal, and so they don't see gender.

I'm like, "No, gender's there. You can't say you don't see it. That's like saying you don't see race. It's there whether you see it or not. It's a problem whether you see it or not."

I think everybody has their passion. So if somebody doesn't deal with this and they're dealing with something else, that's great. But as Mark said, intersectionality is so important because I can't choose between race and gender as far as what's important. So I'm looking at my brothers like they're crazy at some point if they're talking about race and being an activist or an organizer in that regard but having not given gender a second thought.

I always see those connections, and sometimes that's what I have to point out to people individually. So I think we do what we can, and it's a constant thing because once you open a Pandora's box or once you see something, you can't unsee it. So for me it's constant—it's daily.

I love being around people that I don't have to talk about this with because it becomes tiring after a while. You can lose patience. I've been dealing with it my whole life, and I maybe shut it out so I didn't have to deal with it—that's a protective mechanism too.

But now that I have to deal with it, I really see the burden that we carry. So I try to explain that to people.

Howard Mandel: Mark, let me ask you: do you see responses from the audience when you go into activist-like repertoire—politically sensitive repertoire?

Marc Ribot: Yes, to be honest with you. Yes. People often... I think it's very interesting in that most of what we've been talking about today has not been the content of the music—like I'm singing an angry protest song.

We've been talking about mostly organizing goes on behind the scenes—who gets to be on the stage singing that angry protest song or whatever. I'm all for singing angry protest songs. I did a record called "Songs of Resistance" during Trump's first term—a record I'm proud of, but I will never make a multi-artist record again in my life.

Please arrest me. I'll serve the cause in other ways. To be honest with you, I think the content of the songs is important, but not as important as it's made out to be. A lot of artists who are radical artists are expressing radical sentiments as a way of seeking to sell records to a niche market of consumers who identify as radical.

There are worse sins than that. I'm glad people are putting out whatever message they're putting out, but I think a lot of the real organizing is not only what we say, but what we are. In other words, what do we do? Who gets a chance to be on that stage? Who didn't even have the money—when music becomes a marginal occupation where there isn't the institutional framework or support—who can afford to make music when the thing winds up on YouTube the next day? The thing you worked on for months or years is available for free, so the only thing you can get out of it is Spotify's 0.0038 pennies—a third of a penny per stream is a starvation wage.

Who can afford that? So I think it's what we are and how we fight that's important.

One is that conservatories have done a great job teaching young musicians. They all have entrepreneurship classes. They teach everybody entrepreneurship, which is how to take the received environment—how to use the received environment to your advantage. But what there's almost no education about is collective action—how to change that environment. Not just how to hustle within the environment we're given, but how to change that environment through collective political action. We can change laws. Through collective economic action we can create unions and create better conditions.

So I think that the conservatories need to get going on teaching collective action. Musicians have a history of collective action, and there's larger movements—black movements, women's movements. There's a history, and students need to know it, not just so they can be nice people, but to survive because we are facing threats to our livelihoods on the scale of which we have never faced before.

Generative AI—unless it can be... it can be legislated, it can be regulated, and there is a union negotiation coming up in January 2026 in which it can be stopped. But the union is not going to do anything about it unless we unite and make a lot of noise and demand that they do.

The several organizations that I am working with—musicworkersalliance.org is uniting with UMO, which is United Musicians and Allied Workers who have a lot of strength in the indie rock scene, and with the Indie Musicians Caucus of AFM. We're going to make a lot of noise, and we're going to demand that the union go to bat not only for jazz musicians but for all independent musicians—negotiating for our interests in the AI negotiations.

Negotiating for our interests. How about some benefits for the people who play on the indie labels that the major labels distribute? Not only the in-house major label stuff, but right there that takes in an awful lot of jazz. There's other demands that they could be pushing that would help the people on our scene. We're going to demand that they do it, and if they don't—if they say they can't do it or won't do it—we're going to say, "Stop claiming exclusive jurisdiction over our work and let us organize ourselves."

Howard Mandel: Orbert, I'm going to end with you because being who you are is what really has stimulated the Chicago scene. I want to point out your focus on immigrant communities in Chicago, and it seems like several of your concerts have focused on bringing out the connection between jazz and the music of various non-jazz societies. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and to wrap things up?

Orbert Davis: Absolutely. As Mark had said earlier, we learned a lot from the first four years of the person who's in office. When the first immigrant ban—we saw in a weekend this destruction of what those words meant of having a land... I called my good friend Howard Levy, harmonica player, and we just chatted—a one-on-one conversation—"What can we do about this?"

We were actually about a month away from planning our next concert. We decided to stop and just get focused on this. So the idea was we did three different concerts, three years in a row, based on three or four immigrant communities within Chicago.

I am very... I do my business with improvisation. So I have no master plan. We started with Chinese Chicago musicians. I'm like, "I don't know any." So I searched "Chinese musicians living in Chicago," and I came across a man who played multiple instruments, and he agreed to come to our office and talk.

His first thing was he got scared when he saw the word "jazz." He said, "I don't improvise." I said, "Okay, that's no problem." Howard took out his harmonica, I took out a trumpet, and we just started playing. Before you knew it, man, Kerry was like all over it. We said, "Welcome to the world of jazz."

Our next step was what we call "innovation lab." We get the rhythm section together, and we play together. It was disastrous because they were trying to play with us, and it's a whole different language.

Once we flipped the script and said, "You play and let us compose to what you're doing," we created something totally new. So we started that process around October for about a month. Then by January I would start composing by using every word that was spoken, every music that was played in the innovation lab, and creating these works for full orchestra.

I'll never do it again because I sacrificed three years of my life to do that, but we worked within the Chinese American community, Indian—North and South India—West African drumming, oh my goodness, Bulgaria, Mexican American, Japanese. We just did Brazil, Greece. So again...

But the thing that's phenomenal is when we get together as musicians and have those conversations, that's why we call it "Immigrant Stories: Chicago Immigrant Stories." It's just stories that matter. What does it mean to be American from your perspective?

So hopefully this fall we are... we're going to start recording some of those pieces because after three concerts, we've got a plethora of compositions and music that we'll start recording.

But I'm going to call it just "Immigrant Stories" as well instead of "Chicago Immigrant Stories." Again, it may be something that may get blacklisted from the start. I hope it does because then we'll fight even harder to make it happen.

Howard Mandel: That's what it takes. Okay. Terri Lyne, do you have a last word?

Terri Lyne Carrington: No. Really just thank you for having this forum for us to come together and speak in solidarity. Thanks for doing that, Howard, and for supporting these causes because people want to act like politics is not really a part of the daily fabric of life or art, and it's always that conversation about whether art or jazz has a responsibility or not.

I just don't see how you avoid what's happening around you socially, politically. If we don't all do something, even if it's just being conscious... if I go back to gender, being conscious of what you support. I just—I won't mention the organization, but I just saw an email this morning that bugged me because I'll see long lists of groups and festivals still to this day—the most famous jazz club in New York—long lists of who's coming, and there's not one woman.

Politics and social activism is so important within our art form because it's just reflective of our community, and if we have a community, everyone needs to be represented and supported in that community. So thank you for giving us this forum to speak.

Howard Mandel: Thank you for participating. I am very grateful to Terri Lyne Carrington from the Berkeley Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, Orbert Davis, Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, Mark Ribot, an organizer and fantastic guitar player who's working really for the ground-level musicians.

I'm Howard Mandel, president of the Jazz Journalists Association. Thanks all to see you again, and solidarity forever.