The soaring melodies and impassioned phrasing of gospel music have been the cornerstone of R&B from Ray Charles to Whitney Houston, but as the genre adapts to the hip-hop era, gospel is being utilized in strange and not always complementary ways.
These incongruities were evident during an R&B festival held Saturday night at the Rosemont Horizon, as two old school performers–Maze featuring Frankie Beverly and Patti LaBelle–shared the stage with two younger acts, LSG and K-CI & JoJo.
Frankie Beverly, who started his career in Philadelphia more than 30 years ago before moving to California in the 1970s, employs gospel’s cadences and techniques, but his soft, light delivery replaces pulpit-pounding intensity with the breeziness of Caribbean music.
Beverly incorporated gospel’s themes of hope, brotherhood and resiliency into the sunny, festive music–better suited to a summer afternoon block party than a cavernous auditorium.
Even without the outrageous hairdos and costumes for which she is famous, Patti LaBelle remained marvelously flamboyant. “I’m here to represent the full-figured woman,” proclaimed Labelle, dressed in a very tight blue velvet dress with a very short skirt. “I can’t hold my stomach and a note.”
Instead, the 54-year-old singer flaunted everything she had, proudly strutting, squatting, bumping and grinding through her songs in high heels. When the effort took its toll, she brought a half-dozen men out from the crowd and soon had them massaging her feet and eating from the palm of her hand.
Admittedly, LaBelle’s theatrics took as much time as her music, but she still sang plenty of pealing cries, multinote trills and rapidly repeated phrases. Like Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, she drew on gospel’s power and moral authority to establish herself as an indomitable female force.
Having emerged in the 1980s as chart-topping acts, Gerald Levert, Keith Sweat and Johnny Gill recently banded together as LSG, but the results of their collaboration were muddled and overblown.
Amid slinky, percolating grooves and cooing background vocalists, the trio traded verses, their voices not so much carrying the melody as spilling over each other in an outpouring of fervor on “Where Did I Go Wrong” and Levert’s smash “Casanova.”
Each man also took a solo turn reprising old hits, as Levert engaged in torrid testifying with his father, O’Jays singer Eddie; Sweat shimmied his way through “Nobody;” and the hard-bodied Gill’s pleading accompanied his own striptease.
With local R&B star R Kelly making a cameo during “My Body” and a troupe of go-go girls joining the group on several numbers, LSG’s show had plenty of sizzle. The vocal gymnastics and racy gyrations added little substance to the formulaic material, though, and when the members of LSG matched pelvic thrusts to gospel cries, they seemed silly and disrespectful of a rich tradition.
Similarly, JoJo Hailey embarrassed himself when he filled a sermon on unity with profanity, while his brother K-Ci showed off his raspy, growling vocals at every opportunity to JoJo’s obvious annoyance.
