Mike Terry; Baritone saxophonist on Motown's greatest hits of the 1960s (great)
Hyfler/Rosner
Baritone saxophonist on Motown's greatest hits of the 1960s
Richard Williams
guardian.co.uk, Monday December 1 2008 00.01 GMT
For a while in the mid-1960s, the baritone saxophone was the
lead guitar of soul music. More precisely, it was the
instrument identified by certain producers at the Motown
studios in Detroit as the one ideally suited to provide a
momentary contrast to the voices of Martha and the
Vandellas, Mary Wells, the Four Tops, Kim Weston and the
Isley Brothers on such hits as Heatwave, You Lost the
Sweetest Boy, I Can't Help Myself, Helpless and This Old
Heart of Mine. The man who played the solos that formed part
of the warp and weft of those classic records was Andrew
"Mike" Terry, who has died aged 68.
As well as a string of Motown hits, made when he was a
session man for Berry Gordy Jr's fast-growing company, Terry
also participated in a catalogue of the era's dance-floor
classics. They included Darrell Banks' Open the Door to Your
Heart and Our Love (Is in the Pocket), Jackie Wilson's
Higher and Higher, the Fascinations' Girls Are Out to Get
You, Cliff Nobles's The Horse, the Three Caps' Cool Jerk,
Edwin Starr's SOS (Stop Her on Sight) and Headline News, and
the Show Stoppers' Ain't Nothin' But a Houseparty.
Later he became a peripatetic arranger and producer, moving
from Detroit to Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New
York to help create recordings that cemented his place in
the hearts of soul fans, particularly in the north of
England.
Born in a suburb of Houston, Texas, where his father ran a
music shop, Terry moved with his family first to Kansas City
and then to Detroit. He told his biographer, Rob Moss, that
he remembered his mother, who played the piano, transcribing
the saxophone solos of Charlie Parker, and when he enrolled
at Detroit's Cass Tech High School, where many Motown
musicians were educated, he took up the baritone saxophone.
"No one else wanted it," he explained. "I really wanted to
play the trumpet."
His first session for Gordy took place in the late 1950s.
Before long he had joined several future Motown stalwarts in
Popcorn and the Mohawks, who made a handful of unsuccessful
recordings. In 1961 he went on the road with Jackie Wilson's
band, and the following year he was on tour with the first
Motortown Revue, ending at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.
It was in 1963, with Heatwave and You Lost the Sweetest Boy,
that the sound of Terry's baritone started bursting out of
young America's transistor radios. Restricted by the
production team of Lamont Dozier and Eddie and Brian Holland
to short interludes before the final chorus, usually no more
than eight bars long, he made the most of his opportunity
with a heated approach that was short on melodic invention
but long on rhythmic drive. Unlike most of the saxophonists
called upon to provide textural contrast on the hits of the
time, Terry was not a jazz musician earning better money by
playing down to the kids.
His solos hit exactly the right tone, even when providing a
contrast to the breathless croon of the young Diana Ross on
the Supremes' Where Did Our Love Go, their breakthrough hit
in 1964. After Heatwave, a delirious gospel-based song whose
success helped elevate the status of the label as a whole,
he provided similar contributions to Martha and the
Vandellas' near-identical follow-ups, Quicksand and Live
Wire.
When it was not being used in a solo role, Terry's grunting
baritone anchored the horn figures that gave impetus to
songs such as Marvin Gaye's Baby Don't Do It and Kim
Weston's Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While).
Gordy's policy of strict demarcation, one of several
practices borrowed from Detroit's automobile production
lines, meant that his session musicians were not permitted
to try their hand at arranging or producing. While making
the production of music more efficient, men such as Terry
were left frustrated at the denial of opportunities. So
Terry enrolled at the Detroit Institute of Music Arts and
began to moonlight for other labels. Spreading his wings,
Terry went on to work with many artists whose names are
cherished by cognoscenti, including George Clinton, the
Fantastic Four, JJ Barnes, Maxine Brown and the Dells. In
the 1970s he composed film soundtracks and worked on the
off-Broadway production of Big Time Buck White, a black
power comedy musical devised by the singer Oscar Brown Jr
and starring Muhammad Ali.
Strangely, he was not invited to participate in the reunion
of the Funk Brothers, the original Motown session band, six
years ago. The award-winning documentary titled Standing in
the Shadows of Motown took several of the surviving
musicians on worldwide concert tours which finally earned
them individual acclaim, and a measure of belated financial
recompense for their hitherto anonymous labours in creating
some of the best loved and most influential music of the
last century.
The death of Terry, following those of the organist Earl Van
Dyke, the drummers Benny Benjamin and Richard "Pistol"
Allen, the bassist James Jamerson, the guitarist Robert
White, the pianists Johnny Griffiths and Joe Hunter and the
tenor saxophonist Hank Cosby, reduces still further the
surviving brotherhood of the Snake Pit, as Motown's Studio A
was known during its glorious heyday as the fount of so many
imperishable hits.
Terry's wife predeceased him.
. Andrew Alexander "Mike" Terry, saxophonist and record
producer, born July 1940; died October 30 2008