It was Saturday morning and the technical crew was setting up lights, cameras, and microphones. The musicians in the band at Hamden Plains United Methodist Church, on the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Church Street in Hamden, had rehearsed their parts. In the pews in front of the altar, the Rev. Jeremiah Paul, pastor of Hamden Plains UMC, was running parts with the choir — in preparation to document a collaboration, and perhaps the beginning of a beautiful friendship, between Hamden Plains UMC and Yale Gospel Choir.
The combined choir was practicing Donnie McClurkin’s “Create in Me a Clean Heart,” and according to Rev. Paul, “the unison” — all the singers singing the melody together — sounded “wonderful.” But he had ideas for how to make that, and the rich harmonies to follow, sound even stronger.
“Listen to the cadence,” he said. “Punch those lines.” He demonstrated, his voice echoing off the church’s high ceiling. The choir followed suit, and sure enough the music started to soar. As they sang through the passage, Rev. Paul encouraged them more, shouting the first word of the following line to pour on more energy. The band fell in behind them, and there it was: power and humility, moving upward, make even giving a little taste of the divine.
Pearson.
The collaboration between Hamden UMC and Yale Gospel Choir started with an idea from Dunn Pearson, Hamden UMC’s music minister. “Everything begins and ends with relationships,” he said. With a long musical career that included time in the O’Jays, the celebrated musician moved to the area “for love,” he said, in 2021, to be with his partner Shelly M. Jones, who is a professor at Central Connecticut State University. After taking the position at Hamden Plains, he began casting about for ways to connect with his new community. Jones is related to Rise Nelson Burrow, who formerly served as director of Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center. “We reached out to her,” Pearson said, “and she put us in touch with the new head,” Timeica E. Bethel-Macaire, and Zada Brown, current leader of the Yale Gospel Choir and class of 2024 at Yale.
For Pearson, who knew about Yale only by its national reputation before moving to the area, “the first thing I was amazed by was the fact that there were Black students at Yale. It was nice for me to see it,” he said. “I wanted to reach out and we wanted to support.”
Helping that connection was a deep sense of a shared common vision between Hamden Plains and the choir: “The goal of this is that we’re spreading the word of God by praise and worship music,” he said. A collaboration between Hamden Plains and the choir, he suggested, “would be a phenomenal opportunity” to “get to the common goal.”
Pearson’s status as a relative newcomer to the area also played a role. He and Rev. Paul, who is an extremely accomplished singer in his own right, “don’t necessarily see the line between Hamden and New Haven.” New Haven is “just right down the street. We don’t see boundaries. It’s just community, community service.” And “spreading the word of God, that’s universal.”
But what about the town-gown divide? And what about that town line? Pearson said it has been a topic of conversation.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I was telling the students that I’ve been blessed to play Madison Square Garden on more than one occasion with my career with the O’Jays. I’m in that small community that have reached that pinnacle. So when people say ‘that seems unapproachable,’ I say that for us, in that moment, it was relatively easy. There was no nothing about it. It was the fact that we could sell 20,000 tickets. We came with the qualification, so it was no problem.… Why would they turn us down if we could sell the place out?””
So to Pearson, when a person or an institution seems unapproachable at first, it’s maybe because “you’re not bringing them something that makes sense.” Maybe it means “you just got to move what you’re doing up a notch so it does make sense.” It’s about having an idea and a track record. The track record, Pearson and Paul already have. Then it’s a question of finding the right concept, and finding common ground.
“I don’t get angry or discouraged. I just find out where it is,” Pearson said.
The collaboration began about three months ago, when Pearson sent the choir music; the choir got down to practicing. Their first in-person rehearsal was last week, and Pearson was elated. “They were self-managing themselves. They had all the parts down. It sounds wonderful,” he said. “I can’t be more happy and more proud than to see young people joining together in the praise and worship of God.”
The camera crew was just about ready to record. Rev. Paul and Pearson had even more notes for the singers — details to work out, places where the music could surge and subside like a wave. Certain words to lean on. The choir tried them out. The harmonies gelled even more. The phrasing got tighter.
Then Paul had the singers sit down. “I want us all to relax,” he said. And the singers sang their best yet.
Pearson is excited about what Hamden Plains and Yale Gospel Choir can do for one another. “I believe the collaboration will expand the Yale choir, bring the spotlight to them, show that they go outside the imaginary boundary line,” he said. “They want to do that as well. It’s part of the missionary work.”
The video, when it’s finished with editing, will he used “for spreading the word of God via praise and worship,” Pearson said, and also to promote the collaboration itself. He’s interested in working further with Yale Gospel Choir, and perhaps reaching out to other New Haven institutions — like the Shubert Theatre, which happens to be engaged in its own efforts to strengthen its ties with the communities around it. The proof of the concept is in the music itself, “when you see it in the eyes of the students, and see it coming from the heart,” he said.
That held true on Saturday morning, as the choir ran through the end of “Create in Me a Clean Heart.” “Build your church, build your church,” they sang, “from the ground up.” In the way their voices blended together, they were already doing just that.
