Gospel Brunch Takes Church Outside

Before Kevin Monroe and Devotion hit the stage Sunday afternoon on the Green, Rev. Kevin Ewing of Baobab Tree Studios (and formerly of Center Church on the Green) addressed the hundreds of people who had gathered to hear the music and the message. He pointed out that gospel music has been a part of the programming of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas for years, and this year was no different. He welcomed people who already knew gospel and people who were about to get their first taste.

“For those of you who don’t know what gospel is, sit back,” Ewing said. ​“You’re about to learn something.”

He then turned to the faithful. ​“Church folks know what to do,” he said. ​“I hope you brought your shouting shoes.”

The New Haven-based gospel group Kevin Monroe and Devotion was the first of three gospel groups — Pastor Danny Bland, also of New Haven, and Darrel Walls, from Houston, Tex. — to turn the New Haven Green into an air-shaking service for Gospel Brunch, part of A&I’s programming on the Green and featuring Sandra’s Next Generation as a culinary partner.

In keeping things Covid-safe, those who got tickets to the event bought themselves a pod, a space on the Green delineated by a festive, all-weather blanket, with space enough for four people. The ticket included an option to buy soul food off the menu of Sandra’s, which participants could pick up at the restaurant’s Congress Street storefront before attending the show. By 3 p.m., the event’s start time, several dozen pods containing hundreds of people had gathered, many of them eating their food from Sandra’s. One pod featured a buffet laid out on a small table for its occupants. (In full disclosure, this reporter ordered the church plate off of Sandra’s regular menu instead — a massive helping of pulled pork and four sides of collard greens, mac ‘n’ cheese, black-eyed peas and rice, and sweet plantains — and ate everything sitting on the ground within the first 20 minutes of arriving at the Green and was not sorry.)

The singers in Devotion filed onstage to swells from the band’s keyboards, filigreed with guitar lines. ​“Praise the Lord, New Haven!” Monroe shouted from the stage. ​“Come on and give God praise because He deserves it. Because he gave us another day.” That was the cue for the band and singers to launch into their first song, an uptempo number that got heads bobbing.

“God is awesome,” Monroe said. ​“Even through this pandemic, we are glad that we alive and well, and healing, because God has allowed us to be here.”

As the music intensified, it drew the audience in. Many raised their hands in the air, in response to the singers on the stage. They tapped their feet and swayed in their seats. On a slower song, the singers created music that crested in rising waves, building the song up and up and up. As Devotion brought the tempo back up, people clapped on the backbeat.

The group then headed into a song called ​“Satisfied,” which Monroe had written. ​“This is a song I’m so proud of,” Monroe said, ​“and thankful for it pouring into me.”

Pastor Danny Bland and Revival, made up of members of New Haven’s Mt. Calvary Revival Center and its surrounding community, then took the stage and kept kicking it up a notch. Bland was never without a beaming smile, and had a message for the crowd. ​“The songs that you know, sing along. The songs that you don’t know, sing along! We’ll give you the words as we go.”

Several members of the audience rose to their feet and began dancing in their places. The band kept its uptempo pace, getting more and more people to rise and move. ​“It’s going to be a fine day,” Bland sang. ​“A fine day!” the singers responded, and with no clouds in the sky and a breeze across the Green, it was impossible to disagree.

“I was a church baby,” Bland said, as a way to introduce his love of the gospel music of his younger years — that of the ​‘90s. ​“We’re going to go back,” he said, because ​“there’s something about ​‘90s gospel.” The audience in front of him knew all the words, and sang along.

Bland also took a moment to address the crowd seriously. ​“It is incredible to think of everything we have been through, as a city, as a people, as a nation, just in the last 15 months,” he said. ​“So many of us, we’ve lost loved ones, or were sick ourselves.” He took a moment to be thankful for surviving, for being here. ​“If you’re thankful for being here, say ​‘thank you,’” he said. He then had a message that was both uplift and call to action: ​“You have not come this far just to come this far,” he said.

“Sing, pastor!” someone shouted from the audience. And he did.

New Haven’s gospel talent then made way for Darrel Walls of the Walls Group, based in Houston, Tex. The Walls Group is a family band, ​“like the Jackson Five and the Clark Sisters,” as Walls’s bio reads. He began playing drums as a child and moved on to keyboards, but today considers the rhythmic elements of his youth a strong part of his songwriting procesx.

That approach was on ample display as Walls and a trio of backup singers took the stage with his band. Where Monroe and Bland had built their sound on waves of voices, parts that seemed to open like flowers as the songs progressed, Walls built his energy through driving repetition, like the wheels of a runaway train. It was a different sound, less friendly (with less banter between songs) and more intense. Musically it felt both very old — hearkening back to the spirituals that were the building blocks of the modern gospel sound — and infused with modernity, some of the sensibilities of current R&B. It sounded, in a word, new.

“Lift up your hands,” he said, and they did. There were shouts of “hallelujah!” And the day was fine, just as Pastor Bland said it would be.

The International Festival of Arts and Ideas runs until June 27. More information about the festival’s events can be found on its website.