Terry Callier performs at the 40th Montreux Jazz festival in 2006.
*Soul and jazz singer Terry Callier has died.
The 67-year-old songwriter, who experienced belated success in his career after working with acts including Massive Attack and Beth Orton, died on Sunday after suffering from a long illness.
Born in the Chicago projects, Callier was a childhood friend of Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler, and began singing in doo-wop groups in his teens. Later he became a fixture on the city’s coffee house scene, releasing a debut album titled The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier in 1968.
In the early 70s he released three critically celebrated “jazz-folk” albums and toured with George Benson and Gil Scott-Heron, but he had abandoned music for a job as a computer programmer at the University of Chicago until a new generation rediscovered his work in the early 90s.
Five more albums followed, including 2009′s Hidden Conversations, written and produced with Massive Attack.
Callier had been dividing his time in recent years between Chicago and England.
