Terry Callier

The 1972 masterpiece by Chicago singer-songwriter and guitarist Terry Callier, returning here in the Music On Vinyl 180g audiophile edition. Cut at the heart of Callier's tenure on Cadet, the jazz imprint of Chess Records, What Color Is Love stands as the artistic peak of his collaboration with arranger and producer Charles Stepney, captured across three Cadet albums, Occasional Rain (1972), What Color Is Love and I Just Can't Help Myself (1974), plus a fourth project that was cut short by Stepney's death in 1976 at the age of 45.

Recorded at RCA Studios in Chicago with a deep cast of musicians drawn from the Cadet/Chess orbit, Phil Upchurch on guitar, Louis Satterfield on bass, Donald Myrick on flute and saxophone, Donny Simmons and Morris Jennings on drums, Edward Druzinsky on harp, the album moves with a fluidity that resists category. Stepney's orchestrations, shaped by his parallel work with Rotary Connection, Ramsey Lewis and Earth, Wind & Fire, frame Callier's writing in a textural palette where strings, French horn, harmonica and electric piano coexist without strain.

The near nine-minute opener "Dancing Girl" sets the tone, drifting between folk introspection and orchestral sweep. The title track and the elegiac antiwar "Ho Tsing Mee (A Song Of The Sun)" sit alongside the slow-burning "You Goin' Miss Your Candyman", later familiar to a wider audience through the French film Intouchables. Across the seven tracks, Callier's lyrical, lightly worn tenor weaves through arrangements that owe as much to the spiritual jazz of the period as to the Chicago soul lineage of Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler.

Largely overlooked on release, What Color Is Love acquired a second life from the late 1980s onward through British DJs and the rare groove / acid jazz milieu, paving the way for Callier's musical return after years spent working as a computer programmer, and for later collaborations with Beth Orton, Paul Weller and Massive Attack. The record has since taken its place among the essential albums of its era, and one of the most distinctive documents of the Cadet years.

180g audiophile black vinyl. Music On Vinyl.