In a church sanctuary off Oakland’s busy MacArthur Boulevard, Terrance Kelly is teaching his gospel choir how to stretch the name of “Jesus” into a breathtakingly long word.
“Gee…eee…sus,” he sings, accenting the last syllable with quick syncopation. Seated in the church pews, a few dozen choir members catch on to the beat and start chiming in to the accompaniment of an electric organ, bass guitar and drums. “Make it as jazzy as you can,” he instructs.
Among the 55 voices that comprise the award-winning Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir — and regularly sing the praises of Jesus — are a handful of practicing Jews.
“As a Jewish person, it was very hard at first to sing songs that talked about Jesus,” admits 49-year-old Lynne Gurewitz, a Berkeley resident who has been with the choir since its inception in 1986.
Expressing a sentiment echoed by other Jewish and non-Jewish choir members, Gurewitz described gospel as a spirit-lifting activity, irrespective of the religious bent of the lyrics. “My experience over time was the feeling of the music transcends the particulars of the words,” she said.
The choir itself transcends the traditional roots of gospel as a genre linked to African-Americans, their churches and the black experience. The Oakland group is intentionally multifaith and multiethnic.
“People tell us all the time that we’re what heaven looks like,” says Kelly, the 39-year-old artistic director and an African-American.
He estimated that 15 to 20 different faiths — ranging from Baptist to Buddhist — are currently represented in the choir’s membership. The choir grew out of an annual jazz camp held in the Sonoma County community of Cazadero. It started because non-Christians and non-African-Americans, “who didn’t really have a venue for singing gospel music, wanted to sing it,” Kelly explained.
The resulting choir performs more than 30 concerts annually, has a youth group, is producing its third CD and has sung on Grammy Award-winning recordings. It performed last spring to about 600 young adults at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, has appeared at Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon and two years ago, took a nine-day concert tour of Israel.
On Tuesday, Oct. 29, the choir will perform at a San Francisco Jazz Festival concert featuring pianist and band leader Ed Kelly, who is Terrance Kelly’s father. Other performers include drummer Eddie Marshall and saxophonist Jules Broussard. The 8 p.m. event is at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.
The choir’s repertoire ranges from traditional spirituals to contemporary tunes.
Choir member Jonathan Goldstein of San Francisco grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in St. Louis. He found himself drawn to gospel music when he lived next door to a gospel church while attending law school in his hometown.
“I fell in love with gospel music,” said the 37-year-old Goldstein, who later moved to Chicago and began wandering into Sunday services at African-American churches to soak up the sounds.
“There is an energy about the music, about the harmonies of the music and what it does to people listening to it that is, I would say, unique,” said Goldstein, who has been singing since junior high school. “It’s hard to put in words.”
He first heard the Oakland choir perform about six years ago, shortly after moving to the Bay Area, and joined the group two years ago.
“The message that they’re sending is a message of inclusion and diversity,” he said. “What a wonderful way to approach that kind of music. That’s not to say there wasn’t a knot in your stomach when I showed up at practice and started singing about Jesus.”
Goldstein, who frequently attends young adults’ services at Emanu-El and sometimes goes to services at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco, says, “My Jewish roots are incredibly important. I feel both culturally and religiously very Jewish.”
So how does he come to grips with his passion for gospel music? Some songs, he says are universal, such as the spiritual “Lawd, How Come Me Heah?”
“A lot of songs we sing are very much parallel with my own Jewish experience,” adds Goldstein, who arranged the spring concert at Emanu-El.
But even when he sings songs with direct references to Jesus or Christian belief, “I love the musicality to it. It doesn’t bother me to help another group express its faith in a way.”
Kelly says he tries to be sensitive to the diversity of both his choir members and audiences by occasionally making changes in the lyrics. “There are times if I can when I may replace Jesus with Lord or God.”
Other times, he’ll recommend that listeners mentally insert the name of their god into songs mentioning Jesus.
Still, he notes, “by definition, gospel music refers to Jesus Christ.”
Singing in the gospel group nonetheless can sometimes speak directly to Gurewitz’ Jewish soul. The trip to Israel in March 2000 was such an instance.
In one of their concerts in Jerusalem, the Jewish audience responded with unexpected enthusiasm and Gurewitz, who grew up in a Reform Jewish family in suburban New Jersey, found herself incredibly moved.
“I was in tears,” she said. “We sang ‘Let my people go.’ I just dissolved.”