JAZZ REVIEW : Carrington Can Bash With Best

The jazz trap drums are thought of as a male domain, but Terri Lyne Carrington obviously isn’t a believer in stereotypes.

Making her Los Angeles-area club debut at LeCafe in Sherman Oaks on Tuesday, the 23-year-old prodigy--who recently moved to the Southland from the East Coast and appears nightly as a band member on the Arsenio Hall Show--proved from the outset of her show that she could bash with the best.

And while she offered a fluid-yet-controlled ride cymbal beat, firm, woody-sounding fills and soloed with imagination and crispness, Carrington also brought sensitivity, subtlety and empathy to her performance. She concurrently underplayed and maintained a sense that she was in the driver’s seat of her pick-up quartet--Patrice Rushen, piano; Charlie Haden, bass, and Doug Webb, tenor saxophone.

The band, working with little or no rehearsal, delivered a post-bop version of a jam session--two edgy blues, two McCoy Tyner tunes, Eddie Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance” and a sans -melody take on “Body and Soul”--that stressed free-wheeling, expressive blowing over commitment to harmonic structures.

“Walkin’ ” where Webb, a passionate Coltrane devotee, sounded a bit more like his mentor than himself, led to Tyner’s “Island Birdie,” a lilting calypso-ish romp where Rushen, sticking to punchy, rhythmic ideas, was quite effective. On “Dance,” Webb and Carrington engaged in a seething duet, then the drummer soloed, offering a series of brisk patterns before switching to thoughtful variations on the tune’s delicate bossa-rock-funk pulse. Haden’s plump, pleasing sound shone throughout, though the on-again, off-again sound system sometimes rendered him inaudible.

There have been, and are, other woman drummers but Terri Lyne Carrington is perhaps the finest of the bunch.