NEW YORK

Terri Lyne Carrington is just 11 years old and hanging backstage at a concert hall with her friend “Ella” — that’s Ella Fitzgerald to us mere mortals — and the jazz legend wants to introduce her to jazz virtuoso Oscar Peterson, who had just finished performing.

“Ella Fitzgerald says, ‘You need to hear her,’” Carrington, now 55, recalls. “She was just somebody who would encourage me and hang out with me. She was shy, and I was disarming because I was a kid. She took a liking to me.”

So Peterson invites the young drummer to perform alongside him before the audience escapes. They jam onstage, impressing the crowd. One attendee — the then-President of Berklee College of Music — was so wowed he offered Carrington a scholarship to the exceptional music school.

“It was really because Oscar let me play but (also) because Ella introduced me to him and told him, basically, he should hear me,” she said. Anointed by jazz legends, literally, Carrington was destined for greatness. Four decades later, she’s proven she is not only great, but groundbreaking.

She’s earning the highest honor bestowed on jazz artists, the prestigious NEA Jazz Masters Award. The three-time Grammy winner is nominated for best instrumental jazz album – an award she won in 2014 and is the only woman to do so in the show’s 63-year history. She worked as a musical and cultural consultant on the hit Disney/Pixar animation “Soul,” making sure it portrayed the jazz world accurately. And she’s the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and has spent nearly 16 years teaching at the college, well versed in Zoom thanks to the recent pandemic.

She is the personification of Black Girl Magic. “I knew she was going to open some doors since she was around 12 years old,” 11-time Grammy winner and jazz icon Wayne Shorter said. “She’s one of the finest drummers in the world. She has a lot of finesse. She decorates. And she can also drop some bombs.”