by Nigel Jarrett, Jazz Journal, Oct 07, 2022
When Gretchen Parlato penned the swirls of her chart Circling one wonders if she envisaged what drummer and composer Terri Lyne Carrington’s band and the planetary guests she assembled for this album would make of it. The band’s core quintet is infused with contributions from 15 musicians, including Dianne Reeves, Ravi Coltrane and Ambrose Akinmusire. The album forms part of Carrington’s long-term mission to bring jazz women and female jazz composition in from the margins.
Her project, with so much of the distaff side to reinstate from the perimeters to which male-orientated jazz history has consigned and confined it, might be expected to call forth a more strident voice. But the album, comprising 11 tracks by women composers, is the antithesis of (justifiably) angry protest: great tunes, instinctive arrangements and harmonic richness – all of it sequinned by stellar input, not least by Reeves on Eliane Elias’s Moments and Michael Mayo on the aforementioned Circling.