THE BOOTHS

The lineup went this way: Booths, Talleys, Greater Vision, and obviously the point here was that GV was the headliner. But when Michael Booth joked that “we’re so glad the Talleys and Greater Vision could be here to close our program tonight,” it ended up – after all three sets were done – being a kind of deadpan prophecy. Musically, this was a Booth Brothers & Friends concert. From the start, the Booths nailed the first note of “His Grace is Sufficient,” the sound expertly mixed and fully balanced. After three nights of hearing one knobbed intro and botched pick up after another at NQC, first-class beginnings are sadly not something one can take for granted in gospel music. But this was not just a comment on how inexpertly most sound techs run shows these days. The point is that the Booths come out vocally confident, but not stridently or too loudly, as so many groups do in the first few bars while they try to find their notes.

The ensemble sound that the Booths have nearly perfected masterfully molds each phrase to the musical thought – the attack and release so finely calibrated and blended. It’s as if the lyrics dissolve into a finely knit fabric of feeling textured as much by the dynamics of their voices as by the harmonics. That is, how they sing is at least as important as what they’re singing. There’s energy here – a great deal of it, in fact – but it’s contained and held taut, restrained so that lines others would oversing manage to be for the Booths buoyantly subtle. The less impressionistic way of saying this might be that they encored “His Grace” acapella and got a bigger rise out of the place than most groups do with turnarounds twice as loud and half again as fast. I think that’s because such an understated approach gives the music a chance to breathe, to resonate with audiences accustomed to being shouted at and browbeaten into submission by evermore overpowering encores.

The insight the Booths seem to have made – and not just in their opening but throughout their set in general – is not new. The Martins were the most recent trio to popularize it and the Gaither Vocal Band deploys it as needed: namely, emphasizing musical textures and harmonic colorations over volume and dramatic expansiveness. But whereas the Martins had little else to fall back on other than their ability to wring seven different shades of supplication out of a harmonic suspension, the Booths have figured out how to make their sets cohere around this acoustical sound (and here’s the really brilliant part) even and especially when their music is at its trackiest. “Look for Me,” “Tears are a Language God Understands,” “Won’t that Be a Hallelujah Meeting,” and “Castles in the Sand” – especially “Castles in the Sand” – besides featuring Jim Brady a lot, these songs from the middle passage of the Booths’ set were held together by vocal arrangements that foregrounded the kind of harmonic and dynamic intricacy we expect most commonly from acoustical music: vivid and sentient, warmblooded and – in a word – felt. And yet only one song in their set (besides the first encore) was truly acoustical.

To hear what I mean, listen to the final “all” of “He Saw it All.” It’s there even on the recorded version, a little harmonic inflection that makes it sound as though three voices are moving in four different directions (though I suppose that could just be the track). Or “Crucified with Christ,” with which the Booths closed last night. Though Brady sings the song persuasively, Michael Booth seals the whole deal with one note in the final tag, a little augmented flourish that somehow manages to erase the sense of performance and artifice of the show and for a brief moment create what feels like an unmediated experience of the paradox at the heart of the song: living through dying in the transformative action of regenerative grace. I don’t necessarily think everyone (or anyone else) there would have put it that way, but then they were all too busy jumping up and beating their hands together, so I suppose in one way or another we were all more or less saying something similar.

THE TALLEYS

The Booths are a tough act for anyone to follow, and the Talleys did what they could. Which is to say, the same basic set they’ve been doing for the last two years with a few modifications to account for their latest project: Lauren Talley & Her BackUp Singers Sing Some Songs. Seriously, Lauren Talley is a transfixing stage presence, and if she’d do in six or eight months whatever it took Kim Hopper the last decade to do to open up and widen her head tones and get them out of her sinuses (and here’s a good place to say that Kim Hopper’s voice on The Ride is resplendent), Lauren Talley could pretty much write her own ticket, I think. Songs like “That Name” from her solo project, “The Broken Ones” and “Orphans of God” (which were part of the sets final segment last night) really pack the kind of wallop that can launch a career.

But back on earth, the most effective single moment of the Talleys’ set was perhaps the simplest: Roger Talley’s pared down piano solo at the beginning of their forty minutes, which led into a super slick video montage identifying the group on the church’s jumbo-tron monitor overhead (FBC Orlando is more digitized and hot-wired than the space shuttle, I think). This digital introduction made Roger Talley’s labored introduction of each member a little redundant, but it shouldn’t go without saying that the Talleys do an excellent job of integrating live music (that is, Roger at the piano) into their sets and their tracks. We’ve been talking a lot lately about bands this and live music that, but realistically the kind of limited mixed modes the Talleys work in – using a few bars of piano at the beginning or piano-and-voices interlude – is a model that more groups could strive for to enliven otherwise digitally moribund music without breaking the bank.

Roger Talley talks too much, and that wouldn’t be a problem if Debra Talley didn’t talk too … and if Lauren Talley didn’t talk too much. But there’s just entirely too much talking, not least of all the big fat dead spot after the second song during which Roger and Debbie make predictable – though occasionally funny – jokes about twentysome years of marriage etc. This wouldn’t be so bad if much of the stuff they’re staging from their newest album didn’t have a kind of easy-listening feel to it. As it is, the smooth-jazz style of this music – see, for instance, the loungy “No One Ever Cared For Me” – had the cumulative effect of a sedative on the first half of their program.

The song selection for the last half of their set was strong, but it was effectively gutted by this unintentionally hilarious video segment projected overhead during “The Healing.” The clip looked like a recording of some small-time church-theater group dramatizing scenes from the song – the story of the woman touching the hem of Christ’s garment, a contemporary scene of a healing miracle in a hospital room.

Oh. My.

It was the kind of thing that makes you embarrassed for A)The people doing the “acting”; B)The Talleys for thinking it was a good idea; and C)Yourself. Honestly. The wardrobe department seemed to be mostly old bath robes and mangy facial-hair prosthetics. “Jesus” was wearing what looked to be some kind of white canvas hoody with a vented coverlet. Needless to say, all this was both distracting and trivializing. The crowd’s reaction was underwhelming at best, so I don’t think I was alone here. Ditch the video.

Once again, I was disappointed that this crowd, like the NQC audience, didn’t seem to get “Orphans of God,” which is just a gobsmackingly good song and works well thematically with “The Broken Ones” to create an emphasis on the ordinary realities of religious living. But “Testify” woke everybody back up for ….

GREATER VISION

It was weird that the minister of music had GV come on while the love offering was being collected. And even weirder that Gerald Wolfe didn’t ease the awkwardness with some kind of humor. Is this normal, bringing a group on while the plate is being passed?

But no matter. Greater Vision would make a textbook study of product branding. It doesn’t matter that Jason Waldrup struggles to place pretty much every note of substance that comes his way throughout the night (his voice is beginning to consistently have the sound of someone who’s just vocally exhausted all the time). It doesn’t matter than when they sing “He’d a still been God,” that last word comes out variously as “Gad,” “Gawd,” and “Goad” from each guy. It doesn’t matter that like clockwork Gerald Wolfe pulls out the old red song book about halfway through and announces that they’re going to sing some old shape notes … because hardly any groups sing this style of music anymore … just the way nobody sang this style of music anymore when George and Glen and the Cats do-re-meed their way through “Oh Happy Day” 25 years ago (not coincidentally, Wolfe was playing keyboards for them then).

Well actually, on this last point (the matter of Wolfe’s personable stage manner and the way he manages to emanate a certain star quality and folksy charm) it DOES matter. Because this is important. These days Greater Vision musically seems primarily to be a pretext for Gerald Wolfe’s masterful emcee work. It’s not exactly inimitable, because as that redbook anecdote suggests, Wolfe has carefully learned and applied the lessons he received at the Younce School of Showmanship back in the day. But with the exception of a Vep Ellis hymn off GV’s hymns album (which served as a vivid reminder of what GV’s music could be like if it were more often invigorated by work from outside the Rodney Griffin Songbook), GV’s set musically never rose above competent. And yet they were the draw. No question about that.

I have some theories about why Wolfe is so captivating as an emcee, and soon I hope to inflict them upon you. But for now, it’s enough to say that people started getting up and leaving when Rodney Griffin took over to do the spiritual heavy lifting with “Faces.” I think that’s because the real high point of GV’s set was actually a hi-freakin-larious story-joke (in high George and Glen style) about Gerald and Rodney, a banana, a train ride in eastern Europe. To watch and listen to (and to watch everyone else watch and listen to) Gerald Wolfe tell a story like this is to witness a type of greatness in the vernacular arts that comes around a handful of times in a single genre every generation. It would not, I imagine, ever get old, just the way George Younce made every one of those old jokes he told about Glen Payne feel like the first time they’d ever been launched. And this is a good thing for Greater Vision, because “My Name Is Lazarus” and the material it exemplifies just doesn’t seem to be cutting it any more, at least not with the folks in Orlando.

One place to start the “Gerald Wolfe Is a Genius” entry might be a little known solo project Wolfe released in 1989, “Hold Forth the Light”[note: I’ve heard that Wolfe himself pretty much would rather forget this project, but I disagree and it’s my site so …]. It contains in miniature all the marks of smart, well-trained, highly disciplined thinking, arranging, and performing that Wolfe [has since come to be] almost universally known for now: the duet with Joy Gardner (”No Wonder”) suggests the great good sense Wolfe has to pair himself with complementary voices and styles and use guest performances to keep projects and live sets fresh; the orchestrations on “Travel On” and “To Know You More” anticipate the savvy use of strings (real strings, not synthesized garbage) Greater Vision regularly uses to add depth and texture to traditional genres (though Wolfe’s voice itself needs none of these augmentations). But all this is really fancy-talk that misses the point: in southern gospel today, Wolfe is the unrivaled master of stagecraft, both as an emcee and a vocalist. For proof of the former, see the live recording of The Quartets project at the 2003 NQC; for the latter, see his rendition of “The Longer I Serve Him” on the same project - the live and studio versions are equally compelling for different reasons. For something from his early years, check out his show-stealing performance of “The Land of Living” on the Cathedrals’ Can He, Could He, Would He video from [the 1980s] (to say nothing of his impeccable skills at the piano, perhaps best showcased on “Oh Happy Day” from the Can He video). Of course the list could go on at some length. And aside from all he is as a music man, he is also, by all appearances and accounts, a magnificent human being. I recall the year at the convention when he came out to hear the talent contest winner cover “There is a River.” Wolfe’s hanky-waving approval was both generous and rousing, all the more because Wolfe of course will always own that song - and just about any other he decides to sing - as long as he wants.

Here’s to 25 more years of impeccability.

Location: Arnold, Mo.
Setting: First Baptist Church; large but informal
Occasion: Real Evangelism Conference
Average age guesstimate: 57
Opening act: local choir (despite some infelecities, choir gets more sustained applause than GV)
Attendance: ca 500-600
Cost: whatever you want to put in chicken buckets as they pass

Thirty easy minutes: That’s about the best way to describe Greater Vision’s set at the 21st Annual Real Evangelism Conference. GV has been working with Bailey Smith ministries, which runs the REC, for a lot of years now. And obviously these kinds of partnerships are bread and butter for a group like GV. Reliably friendly and receptive audiences. Light workload, brisk product sales in the lobby. But I don’t feel like it’s terribly fair to judge them as artists or performers by these gigs. This one tonight could have been phoned in save for “Common Garments.” At any rate, tonight was just kinda blah. They sang six songs in just over thirty minutes …very little crowd interaction, though what there was of it was typical genius showmanship from Wolfe. I gather there is a certain agreed-upon arrangement between the groups that variously perform with Bailey (GV, Karen Peck & New River, Alison Durham, The Crabbs, The Booth Brothers and Mercy’s Mark) and his troupe of traveling evangelists (among them Jerry Falwell, who’s speaking tomorrow night … oh my). That is, Gerald Wolfe agrees not to upstage the likes of Falwell or Paige Patterson, and in return GV gets to continue with this plum gig.

Mind you, it wouldn’t be difficult to upstage this bunch of paint-by-number preachers. Haven’t these guys heard any new jokes in the last thirty years? Have they no other way of endearing themselves to the local crowd than to pander and fawn over the local choir (whose performance tonight was earnest but uneven, or perhaps it was just the song selection) and the attendant orchestra (some major horn issues, alas)? In comparison, Wolfe was all easy charm and understated grace … he never moved more than an inch or two from the same spot, never did more with has arms or hands than motion slightly, never spoke above a conversation voice … but the room was his for as long as he wanted it. And GV didn’t even break a sweat. Opened with “I Was Blind” (ugh) and “There’s Still Room” from Faces, which were both very meticulously rendered but serviceable as live performances go (the lackluster choir was filtering in through the back of the sanctuary all during these songs so there was no need to try to gather up the room at that point). “My Name is Lazarus” perked things up and no one seemed to mind as much as me that “Samaritan’s Heart” is a piece of musical swiss cheese, full of dead spots and awkward fissures and gaps where nothing happens and I feel awkward for the performers who have a look of equal parts embarrassment and annoyance in their eyes during these long caesuras. “Common Garments” was the high spot. It seemed to awaken Rodney Griffin and Jason Waldrup, shake them out of the familiarity of the newest material from Faces. Then Wolfe wrapped things up with “It is Well.” Of course the place lit up like a hockey game on goal, but the remarkable thing is that Wolfe really wasn’t doing anything that out of the ordinary for his voice. He didn’t deviate from the Faces cut of the song much. It wasn’t like there was some “live” moment. He’s simply capable of rousing a room of 600 Baptists with his everyday stuff. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Waldrup stands over there gently pushing the sliders up throughout the tune, so that by the time it ends, the stracks can support the intensity of Wolfe’s voice and reinforce the Big Finish. People don’t seem to mind when it’s too loud and they like it.