Terri Lyne Carrington – HuffPost 2.18.13

Mike Ragogna: Do you have any advice for new artists?

Terri Lyne Carrington: I talk to my students all the time, and everybody is different, but the one thing I’ve realized is that experience is king. Experience is what will get you where you need to be. You’ve got to be prepared of course, and that can come a lot of different ways, but experience is the one that really gets you to where you need to be, and you can’t expect to have it at a young age. You end up finding people who have so much talent, but lack of experience, so how do you skip a few steps in that process that life experience gets you? I’m not sure–I don’t know the answer to that–but I try to talk to them about my experiences, and I try to be intuitive about what kind of experience they need to take themselves forward, then try to just talk them into that direction.