performance
A professional violinist, vocalist and composer, Terry began music studies at the age of seven and attended the prestigious High School of Music and Art in New York City. She is a protégé of the Free Jazz Movement, and has performed and lectured throughout the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Brazil, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Israel, India, South Africa, and Mexico. Terry has recorded with and been a member of ensembles led by Archie Shepp, Leroy Jenkins, Joseph Jarman, Marion Brown, Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Henry Threadgill, Elliot Sharpe, John Carter, and a host of others.
As a young teenager, she began playing guitar and learning the songs of social activist voices of the time: Phil Oches, Buffy Sainte Marie, Bob Dylan. Her first major public performance at the age of 16 was at Central Park at an anti-war moratorium where she sang Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” for an audience of 3,000.
Completely taken with John Coltrane’s excursions into the avant-garde, she began exploring expressive range of her violin.
“When I play or sing, I’m looking for something that’s buried beneath the surface… behind the sound. Each note, a stepping stone towards the next one. ”
After college, while living in Amherst Massachusetts, she became fully focused on the world of improvisation. Playing with such notables as Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and Steve Reid, as well as developing projects with her contemporaries Kevin and Brandon Ross, Steve McCraven, Avery Sharpe, and Michael Gregory Jackson.
Between 1980 and 1990, Terry returned to New York City where she would study with violinist Leroy Jenkins and vocal coach Edward Boatner (renowned teacher and father of Sonny Stitt). An intensive period of self-study guided by some of the most prominent Free Jazz luminaries and their allegiance to originality would further shape her.
“My sense of rhythm is a little funny I think. Quirky maybe. In a way, it’s like my hair, which I’ve always refused to straighten, it’s what comforts me when I feel really far from home.”
Jenkins soon invited her to join his two-violin electric band Sting! Playing festivals in Europe and clubs in NYC became her primary focus. Other projects and associations during that period included performances with Henry Threadgill, Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Elliott Sharpe, and John Carter. Visits and conversations with Ornette Coleman inspired her, often sitting in on his rehearsals with Coleman’s Prime Time, since her then husband James Kamal Sabir was one of Coleman’s two drummers. In 1988, soon after co-producing a concert at the Apollo Theater featuring her own band and four other bands associated with the Black Rock Coalition, she left New York again and returned to the Amherst Massachusetts area.
“Sometimes, my voice has a prophetic sound. Like I’m warning. I didn’t manufacture that sound. It’s not even one I’ve always liked. I don’t really know where it comes from. It’s hardly my mother’s vibrating, swelling bell tones, or my father’s soothing serenade. ”
Then between 1990 and 2010, developing projects that applied her skills in visual art and poetry became more of Terry’s focus. With a doctoral degree in Education, she began teaching at the university level. Introducing musical notation to non-musical populations gave birth to fresh conceptual approaches in her own work. She began exploring the use of graphs, paintings, drawings, stories, 3-D constructions and other vehicles for improvisation. Training public school teachers in the use of the arts gave birth to fresh ideas for her own performances. She formed new ensembles that featured these approaches and began focusing almost exclusively on interdisciplinary work. This has included collaborations with such visionary women as Jin Hi Kim, Kim Clarke, Maria Mitchell, and Gunda Gottchalk.
“When I play, I’m hunting for the warmest spot…. untangling knots and pulling out threads, webs, nests with my teeth to let some light into this place. I just hope my choices are luminous. Sometimes I loose sense of who and what I am. But, I still know fully that I’m building something really big.”
Terry soon delved into a daring, bare-bones approach, preferring to take the stage with minimal structures, while creating sophisticated and emotional collaborations and solo works.
Lydia On The Top Floor, a portrait of a girl growing up and the mother who shaped her in a Bronx housing projects in the early 1960s told through music, dance, film and spoken word with an ensemble of women.
My Bronx (2013) an interdisciplinary theater work of tremendous proportion and scope, a memoir that folds together her music poetry and visual art in a complete way. A composed poem comprised of text, music, and movement tells the story of a girl growing up in the housing projects during the 1960s. Featured over the years at major international venues, her 2014 performance work My Bronx, was a theatrical memoir that toured the National Theaters of Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia.
This was followed by another theater project in 2018 entitled, “The Pass” Designed for an ensemble of women musicians, a dancer, and actor, The Pass is the first of a two-part project. Part memoir, part fable, Jimmy, a canary that looks more like a cat, feels like his life is just too hard and decides to try his luck in the world disguised as a cat. In 2019 “Pelala,” the third in her memoir series was a solo performance. In the second part of this fable about Jimmy, a canary pretending to be a cat, an important lesson about being one’s authentic self is taught by Pelala, an ancestor who takes the form of a pigeon to make herself more acceptable to Jimmy. She makes him look closely at the pretenders within our political sphere and offers him wisdom found in traditions.
All four visionary projects were directed by Linda McInerney, founder and Artistic Director of Eggtooth Productions, Greenfield, MA.