Review: Christie Dashiell & Terri Lyne Carrington, ‘We Insist 2025!’

This review was featured among CapitalBop’s year-end list of the top 5 D.C. jazz albums for 2025. Albums were selected by a panel of D.C. jazz writers and enthusiasts, and I was very honored to vote with that panel for the third consecutive year. -LJM

Steeped in sonic traditions spanning the spectrum of Black American Music, We Insist 2025! is a collaboration between Boston-based drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and D.C.-rooted vocalist Christie Dashiell. Dashiell’s star continues to rise in D.C. — where she now teaches jazz vocals at Howard University, her alma mater — but this release marks the latest entry in an oeuvre that has increasingly garnered renown nationally and beyond. 

Her vocal prowess is matched by a band typical of Carrington’s discography to date: at once lush and heavy-hitting, fluid yet locked in, in contact with jazz tradition and pushing toward the future. To sit comfortably between these extremes is a delicate feat, but the ensemble — which features a strong cast of young and rising instrumentalists, including trumpeter Milena Casado and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin — accomplishes that, while paying tribute to Max Roach’s seminal album of jazz protest from 1961, We Insist! (co-written by Oscar Brown Jr. and featuring the vocals of Abbey Lincoln). 

Thematically, We Insist 2025! seeks a similarly delicate balance, with spoken-word performances blending beautifully with Dashiell’s vocals throughout. The lyrics weigh the struggles of Blackness in America; the contradictions between freedom and capital, and between activism and materialism; and the question of what freedom itself means. Freedom is “no walls and no cages and no glass ceilings, either,” as Tamia Elliot says on “Freedom Is…” — a sentiment embodied by the music here.