Terry Callier
Terrence Orlando "Terry" Callier was an American soul, folk and jazz guitarist and singer-songwriter.
Callier was born in the North Side of Chicago, Illinois, and was a childhood friend of Curtis Mayfield, Major Lance and Jerry Butler, and began singing in doo-wop groups in his teens. At the same time as attending college, he then began performing in folk clubs and coffee houses in Chicago, becoming strongly influenced by the music of John Coltrane. During this period, he briefly performed in a duo with David Crosby in Chicago and New York City.
He continued to perform in Chicago, and in 1970 joined the Chicago Songwriters Workshop set up by Jerry Butler. He and partner Larry Wade wrote material for Chess and its subsidiary Cadet label, including The Dells' 1972 hit "The Love We Had Stays on My Mind", as a result of which he was awarded his own recording contract with Cadet as a singer-songwriter. Three critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful albums followed, produced by Charles Stepney: Occasional Rain (1972), What Color Is Love (1972), and I Just Can't Help Myself (1973). These demonstrated that Callier's influences included soul, jazz, funk, psychedelia, and classical music.
Callier continued to perform and tour until 1983, when he gained custody of his daughter and retired from music to take classes in computer programming, landing a job at the University of Chicago and returning to college during the evenings to pursue a degree in sociology. He re-emerged from obscurity in the late 1980s, when British DJs discovered his old recordings and began to play his songs in clubs. Acid Jazz Records head Eddie Piller reissued a little-known Callier recording from 1983, "I Don't Want to See Myself (Without You)", and brought him to play clubs in Britain. From 1991 he began to make regular trips to play gigs during his vacation time from work.
In the late 1990s Callier began his comeback to recorded music, collaborating with Urban Species on their 1997 EP Religion and Politics and contributed to Beth Orton's Best Bit EP in 1997 before releasing the album Timepeace in 1998, which won the United Nations' Time For Peace award for outstanding artistic achievement contributing to world peace. His colleagues at the University of Chicago did not know of Callier's life as a musician, but after the award the news of his work as a musician became widely known and subsequently led to his dismissal by the University.
As well as touring internationally, Callier continued his recording career, releasing five albums after Timepeace, including Lifetime (1999), Alive (2001), Speak Your Peace (2002), featuring Paul Weller on the single "Brother to Brother", Golden Apples of the Sun (2003) and Lookin' Out (2004). May 2009 saw his album Hidden Conversations featuring Massive Attack released on Mr Bongo records.
He died from cancer on October 27, 2012, aged 67.
