About the Festival
Twelve years ago, Darryl Settles (owner of Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen and president of D’Ventures Limited, LLC) produced the South End’s first jazz festival and had a surprise turnout of nearly 10,000 people. Settles continued to manage the event for seven years, growing the festival attendance to over 50,000 and making the BeanTown Jazz Festival Boston’s most popular outdoor festival. Berklee College of Music has supported the festival since its start, and in 2007 Berklee inherited production of the festival to make it a permanent part of Boston’s cultural calendar.
The Berklee BeanTown Jazz Festival has delighted tens of thousands with a host of jazz, Latin, blues, and groove acts. Our communities come out in force—with attendance swelling to 70,000 strong at its height—to enjoy world-class music on three stages, great eats, and good times stretching six blocks in Boston’s historic South End. Families are entertained with face painting, inflatables, photos, and an instrument petting zoo. More than 70 vendors participate, making the Berklee BeanTown Jazz Festival the place to be.
Berklee College of Music, for the second year, was the proud recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the 2011 Berklee BeanTown Jazz Festival. In awarding the prestigious Access to Artistic Excellence grant to Berklee and consortium partner JazzBoston, Inc., the NEA cited the festival as a celebration of Boston’s diversity as reflected in the attendees, music, food, and crafts.
Terri Lyne Carrington
Artistic Director
Grammy Award–winning drummer, composer, producer, and clinician Terri Lyne Carrington, was born in 1965 in Medford, Massachusetts. After an extensive touring career of more than 20 years with luminaries like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Al Jarreau, Stan Getz, David Sanborn, Joe Sample, Cassandra Wilson, Clark Terry, and more, she returned to her hometown. Back on her home turf, she’s recording, performing, and teaching percussion at Berklee, her alma mater.
Carrington, a 2003 Berklee honorary doctorate recipient, gained recognition on late night TV as the house drummer for the Arsenio Hall Show, then again in the late 1990s as the drummer on the Quincy Jones late night TV show, VIBE, hosted by Sinbad. In 1989, she released a Grammy-nominated debut CD, Real Life Story, which featured Carlos Santana, Grover Washington Jr., Dianne Reeves, and Wayne Shorter.
She has worked as a producer in collaboration with several artists, and her production of the Dianne Reeves Grammy-nominated CD, That Day, helped the disc reach the top of the charts. Other side projects include Hancock’s Grammy Award–winning CD Gershwin’s World, where she played alongside Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.
Carrington's latest album, The Mosaic Project, earned her a Grammy Award in 2012 for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Featuring a “who’s who” of female jazz artists—from Berklee alumna/2011 Best New Artist Grammy recipient Esperanza Spalding ’05 and Nona Hendryx to Hailey Niswanger ’11 and Geri Allen—the album is composed of original tracks penned by Carrington as well as Carrington’s arrangements of featured artists’ songs.
Coming off that project, this year’s Berklee BeanTown Jazz Festival theme couldn’t be more timely: Celebrating Women in Jazz.
“This has been a common emerging theme in recent years in the press and at festivals, performance spaces, and educational institutions,” said Carrington in anticipation of the festival’s 12th run. “There are more and more formidable female players to celebrate every day who are deserving of wider recognition.”
