Uplifting choir seeks high honor

Two months ago, Atlanta West Pentecostal Church choir members were raising the rafters in their church in Lithia Springs. On Saturday, they’ll try to do the same in front of thousands at Philips Arena.

The path to Philips began when a choir member saw a commercial about the Verizon Wireless How Sweet the Sound gospel competition. Atlanta West entered the regional sing-off and hit the sweet spot.

They rocked the audience and blew away the judges with a high-spirited, hand-clapping rendition of “We Lift Our Hands in the Sanctuary.”

“We loved everything about this choir!” effused Atlanta-based Cory Condrey, aka gospel DJ Coco Brother, one of three judges in the regional competition.

As the lights came up on the diverse group of 45 singers that night, a mood seemed to settle on them, something they pray will happen again at the national finals at Philips.

“You could feel it, like electricity,” said tenor Daniel McHugh.

Stage lights blazed, McHugh and the others hit their first notes and the audience rolled to its feet like a wave cresting across the arena. They clapped. They shouted and cheered.

“The crowd was with us,” tenor Mark Measels said.

The spirit of the music took the singers and listeners to that rare place religious music strives to find, a state where the curtain between this world and the other gets pulled back for a moment and spirits merge in spontaneous joy.

The sound, the emotion the singers expressed, even the racial mix of black, white and tan faces that is rare for churches, made them something special, Condrey said.

“I think they are going to take it all the way,” he said.

On Sept. 15, the audience voted Atlanta West the winner of the People’s Choice Award, which brought a $5,000 prize that the choir added to the $10,000 it won for being named overall winner. The church, whose three Sunday services including a Latino congregation draw more than 600, stand to gain another $25,000 if they take the national title.

Winning is good. But it is not the reason they sing, said director Brandon Frazier. The goal of their performances is to find that sweet spot, not always easy, and take others there with them.

Choir member James Scott summed it up.

“We were not expecting to win it all, because we are a choir that just loves what we do. We are not an entertaining choir. We just love to praise God,” he said.

It showed in their smiling faces and swaying bodies the night of the competition. It shows every Tuesday or Wednesday night when they gather to practice.

They pray before starting, standing Pentecostal fashion with hands raised, extemporizing aloud earnest pleas that their music bring others closer to God.

That is what is different about gospel music, said Atlanta gospel superstar Dottie Peoples. Gospel music has a power and purpose beyond entertainment.

It helps.

“Everybody has a beat. Everybody has a move. But with gospel, we have the beat, the good music, and gospel music is healing,” she said. “Now that bopping music, all that is good. But it’s not healing.”

Edna Patterson, a gospel music promoter whose father Esmond Patterson was a gospel radio institution for more than 40 years in Atlanta, said gospel is the original soul music.

“Times are tough now. A hip-hop song is not going to get your soul right and help you through the next day,” she said. “You need something that sticks to your bones. Gospel music is the real thing. They are singing from the heart, and for me, that is the biggest difference.”

A choir that can win a sing-off in Atlanta can win anywhere, Patterson said. “When you talk about gospel, you have got to talk about Atlanta first.”

Atlanta is home to a plethora of mega-churches that can pick from hundreds of singers to form a choir. It has a history of great preachers and one of the nation’s first black-owned radio stations. It is home to the nationally broadcast Gospel Music Channel and a chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America, and stars such as Peoples, Canton Jones and Bishop Paul Morton.

Frazier, 32, whose bouncing, animated style when conducting Atlanta West could have taught James Brown a thing or two about busting a move, is even more energized by the excitement of winning and competing again.

He is a perfectionist who will run his singers through a line five, 10 or 20 times, until it sounds right to him —- and that was before all this competition.

Performance, he said, is about honing the parts that can be practiced until they become second nature. Then comes that ineffable addition.

“Once we rehearse and get it down, it’s easy to add the worship and energy and praise that makes it what it is,” Frazier said.

“[Music] does something that preaching and counseling can’t do,” Frazier said.

“Sometimes you hold things in. But music frees you.”

> ON THE WEB: See Atlanta West’s region-winning performance: www.howsweetthesound.com/finalist.aspx