It’s all about Terry Lee Brown Jr. nickname
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A tip for those who believed that Terry Lee Brown Jr. was an authentic Chicago producer with a velvet baritone of African origin. Having switched his attention from fast techno and heavy trance to laidback house of lesser depth in the middle of the 90s, Norman Feller was lucky to meet the founder of the Plastic City label at one of the house parties in neighbouring Frankfurt. Feller received an order for a remix from the new label and started thinking about an appropriate name for the new music.
“So I was writing down all these names I thought could work in my studio. Terry I liked because it could be male or female. Lee, I don’t know how I came up with that, and then Brown because an American friend of mine had this last name. So I called Alex, the owner of Plastic City and I told him the name and he suggested to add the Jr. part of it and it was done, it was brilliant.
It wasn’t really my intention for it to sound like an American producer, but then a lot of my black friends from my hometown told me this was a pretty typical name for a black man to have from America.”
To make it more mysterious, Norman didn’t show his face and instead put a caricature of a typical Chicago house producer on his first releases. “There were never any never bad intentions with the cartoon character; it was more like an homage rather than a derision rather than a derision,” explains Feller. “I have the greatest respect and admiration for black music and black culture. It has been very influential in my sound and musical approach.”
His efforts weren’t fruitless — already the first album Brother for Real gave Norman the respect of American musicians. “They were really surprised that Terry Lee Brown Jr. is actually a white guy from Germany.”
