Terri Lyne Carrington pays homage to the spirit of revolution with ‘We Insist! 2025’ Feb. 5 at Eisenhower Auditorium

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026) — Jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington will lead a live band in a reimagining of songs from the “free” jazz era and “Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.”

“We Insist! 2025,” starring the four-time Grammy Award-winning musician and featuring vocalist Christie Dashiell, will be at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5, in Eisenhower Auditorium.

Tickets are $47 for an adult, $14 for a University Park student, and $33 for a person 18 and younger and are available for purchase online. Avoid the $4 fee by purchasing over the phone at 814-863-0255 or in person, weekdays 10 a.m.–4 p.m., at Eisenhower Auditorium.

Visit “We Insist! 2025” online for more information and to purchase tickets.

‘We Insist!’ — now and then

Morgan Guerin, Milena Casado and Matt Stevens, all featured on “We Insist! 2025,” also will perform live.

Released in 1960, the avant-garde jazz response “We Insist!” (subtitled “Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite”) features five works concerning the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights era.

In 2022, Roach’s album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

Roach’s recording became avant-garde and protest music of those turbulent times, and the Carrington-Dashielle tribute calls on his legacy while expanding its sonic palette with hints of gospel, neo-soul, funk, Afro-Latin, West African traditions and blues.

“I had a history with reimagining projects in other people’s work, and helping that legacy continue, but doing it in a way that also has my own identity involved in a way that really feels new, in a sense,” Carrington said in an interview with the LA Times. “The music is not new, but so many elements around those things are new. So I feel like it’s reshaping these things a little, even though we didn’t change the lyric content. By changing the music around the lyrics, it gives the lyric a different slant.”

Watch Carrington and Dashiell perform “Freedom Day.”

Acknowledgments

Support provided by
Sandra Zaremba and Richard Robert Brown Program Endowment

Accessibility services supported by
Sidney and Helen S. Friedman Endowment

A grant from the University Park Fee Board makes Penn State student prices possible.

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