When the alto saxophonist Angélla Christie strode onstage on Friday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she was joined only by a piano player. But Christie, one of the more prominent instrumentalists in contemporary gospel, was at full throttle from the very first note — playing in high-gloss, reverb-drenched ostinatos — and within moments, the crowd had become her rhythm section, clapping along on every off-beat.
An usher got swept up while walking a couple to their seats, and on her way back up the aisle she shimmied a bit, her right hand flying into the air in a testifying motion. A woman sitting at the end of Row H reached out for a high five, and their palms gripped each other for a moment.
It was just a few minutes into “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” — part of BAM’s multidimensional “Eldorado Ballroom” series, brilliantly curated by Solange via her Saint Heron agency — and already something was hitting different.
After Christie, the concert continued with two more sets: selections from Mary Lou Williams’s religious suites, delivered by the 14-person Voices of Harlem choir and a pair of virtuoso pianists, Artina McCain and Cyrus Chestnut; and a roof-raising show from the indomitable Clark Sisters, the best-selling band in gospel history and a fixture of Black radio since the 1980s.
That’s a lot already: a stylistic tour of Black American religious music, mostly in the hands of women, going back more than 50 years. But “Eldorado Ballroom” was aiming for even more. Rarely does a single series pull together so many strands — not just of Black music, but of Black creativity writ large — into an open-ended statement, speaking to what might be possible as well as making a comment on how Black creative histories ought to be remembered.
“Eldorado Ballroom” is an extension of the work Solange has been doing for the past 10 years under the auspices of Saint Heron. As she told New York magazine’s Craig Jenkins…
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