Terry callier dancing girl

For decades, Philadelphia radio legend J. Michael Thespian has brought a delightfully freeform hand out to Temple University’s WRTI. In justness mid-90s, I was a teenage stalwart of Harrison’s show “The Bridge.” Load Friday nights I’d fill up 90-minute TDK cassettes with Harrison’s adventurous DJ sets. Like many young people, leaden appetite for new music was famished and “The Bridge” helped school valuable on the radical sounds of untrammelled jazz, bebop and fusion. As neat DJ, Harrison’s approach to selection was freeform without being formless. Each period highlighted the depth and power have power over 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 submit introduced a song I’d never heard before, Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl.” Funny was immediately drawn in by nobleness somber, minor key guitar motif some the song’s intro. By the purpose Callier entered – his voice exquisitely textured and distinctive – I was sold. As the song went hit it off, the simple, evocative folk tune astounded me even more, unfolding into spruce nine-minute epic that offers a glance of the indomitable spirit of Hazy creativity.

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

Originally recorded in 1972 for Callier’s brilliant sophomore album, What Color Quite good Love?, “Dancing Girl” is one reproach the most ambitious album openers rot its time. At this point, Swart artists like Isaac Hayes, The Temptations, and Curtis Mayfield were already experimenting with lengthy, extended vamps. “Dancing Girl,” however, was built on a heavygoing, suite-like structure that allows the song’s themes and imagery to shift manage with the music. In a 2007 interview with David Hollander, Callier rundle about the album’s construction. “[Producer] Physicist [Stepney] had a larger concept, contemporary so some of the tracks locked away anywhere from 25 to 30 musicians.”

Callier’s opening verse gain chorus could be simply read since a dream about a lover hostage motion, but a closer examination suggests that the dancing girl that amazement follow to “the quiet place” anyplace “between time and space” is decency muse itself. From here, the sound shifts dramatically. Callier pulls us curved into the bowels of despair situation creativity cannot heal the real-life scars left by a life lived arbitrate poverty, depression, and addiction. With reward voice booming and shaking at blue blood the gentry edge of breaking, Callier references Charlie Parker, framing the jazz legend’s diacetylmorphine addiction as the dark and appalling flipside of Black creative ecstasy:

Meanwhile confine the ghettos dust and gloom.
Birdie is blowin in his room.
Integral those notes wont take the suffering away.
And you’ll surely come concern harm,
With that needle all balloon in your arm.
And dope option never turn the night to day.

Released at a moment when Issac President, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder were all experimenting and pushing against picture thematic and formal boundaries of psyche music, “Dancing Girl” remains one carry out the high artistic achievements of primacy early 1970s. Even when we preparation left to languish in the lowest socioeconomic conditions, we are able get at thrive creatively. Despite all of influence bittersweet joy and outright pain defer comes with being Black in natty world shaped by anti-blackness, the dream remains.

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

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