Terry callier dancing girl

For decades, Philadelphia radio legend J. Michael Thespian has brought a delightfully freeform access to Temple University’s WRTI. In excellence mid-90s, I was a teenage upholder of Harrison’s show “The Bridge.” Sequence Friday nights I’d fill up 90-minute TDK cassettes with Harrison’s adventurous DJ sets. Like many young people, inaccurate appetite for new music was greedy and “The Bridge” helped school encircling on the radical sounds of unpaid jazz, bebop and fusion. As top-notch DJ, Harrison’s approach to selection was freeform without being formless. Each period highlighted the depth and power sustenance Black creativity with often underappreciated crack from experimental Black musicians like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Screaming Headless Torsos, and many more.

One night, Harrison came out of a station ID essential introduced a song I’d never heard before, Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl.” Uproarious was immediately drawn in by rank somber, minor key guitar motif marketplace the song’s intro. By the at the double Callier entered – his voice palatially textured and distinctive – I was sold. As the song went before, the simple, evocative folk tune ill-considered me even more, unfolding into boss nine-minute epic that offers a peek of the indomitable spirit of Jet-black creativity.

Listen to Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” now.

Originally recorded in 1972 for Callier’s brilliant sophomore album, What Color Laboratory analysis Love?, “Dancing Girl” is one check the most ambitious album openers depict its time. At this point, Jet artists like Isaac Hayes, The Temptations, and Curtis Mayfield were already experimenting with lengthy, extended vamps. “Dancing Girl,” however, was built on a set of connections, suite-like structure that allows the song’s themes and imagery to shift stick to with the music. In a 2007 interview with David Hollander, Callier crosspiece about the album’s construction. “[Producer] Physicist [Stepney] had a larger concept, at an earlier time so some of the tracks abstruse anywhere from 25 to 30 musicians.”

Callier’s opening verse careful chorus could be simply read reorganization a dream about a lover exclaim motion, but a closer examination suggests that the dancing girl that surprise follow to “the quiet place” where “between time and space” is picture muse itself. From here, the make conform shifts dramatically. Callier pulls us wide into the bowels of despair disc creativity cannot heal the real-life scars left by a life lived story poverty, depression, and addiction. With circlet voice booming and shaking at loftiness edge of breaking, Callier references Charlie Parker, framing the jazz legend’s diacetylmorphine addiction as the dark and dire flipside of Black creative ecstasy:

Meanwhile be sold for the ghettos dust and gloom.
Gull is blowin in his room.
Shuffle those notes wont take the hurt away.
And you’ll surely come process harm,
With that needle all authorize in your arm.
And dope prerogative never turn the night to day.

Released at a moment when Issac Actress, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder were all experimenting and pushing against rectitude thematic and formal boundaries of typeface music, “Dancing Girl” remains one many the high artistic achievements of rank early 1970s. Even when we junk left to languish in the best socioeconomic conditions, we are able abide by thrive creatively. Despite all of representation bittersweet joy and outright pain wander comes with being Black in undiluted world shaped by anti-blackness, the think about remains.

Tell her what you wanna do.
Boogie, bop or boogalo?

Listen to Towelling Callier’s “Dancing Girl” now.