Gilles Peterson and Talkin' Loud brought Terry Callier back to the spotlight in the wake of the late 80s "jazz-boom". The grizzled, soft-voiced singer/guitarist was dropped into folk or soul racks for years, despite his jazzy agility. But a younger and more flexible audience over the past decade has been happy to hear Callier's diverse talents coexist, as naturally as they do in his head.
That's what happened at the Pizza Express, where Callier played two full-length shows back to back. He was accompanied by a subtle local jazz ensemble featuring Jim Mullen on guitar and Dave Barnard on bass, with Bosco D'Oliviera's mellow, propulsive congas. The band added fine nuance to passages that needed no more than that, swung Callier's reflective, confiding songs when it wouldn't hurt them to canter a little, and provided ideal bouyancy when he put his acoustic guitar aside to be a freewheeling, scat-singing jazz vocalist.
Callier has long been a songwriter of immense diversity and eloquence, with classics such as Occasional Rain and What Colour is Love still eagerly demanded by audiences who have maybe felt shortchanged by some of his more recent output. In this setting, the singer could relax and forget his profile before full houses that hung on every sound.
Guitarist Jim Mullen excelled himself (singers seem to bring out the best in him): in the eloquently spiritual Keep Your Heart Right, he doubled the tempo in a solo that somehow intensified the emotion while sustaining the song's eerie stillness. Then Mullen went the other way, supplying only a minimal chime and slur behind Callier's quiet wail on a bluesy shuffle. There, the singer's sudden eruption into a defiant falsetto tingled the spine. Callier's fine-tuning of timbre gives his voice immense power at low volumes, and his sense of drama and contrast creates an atmosphere of intense expectancy. He sang Summertime almost in a whisper (to the Miles Davis/Gil Evans chords), and Satin Doll in long, sliding elisions in which Mullen's high guitar fills sounded almost flute-like. Heartwarming music.
