Review: The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir ‘I’m Amazed… LIVE’ (Brooklyn Tabernacle/INO Records) 2006.

Here’s a DVD of 1 hour 30 minutes of brilliant black gospel music – a beautiful, very professional production.

The songs are all ‘black gospel’ which means you won’t experience any Bach or classical/mainline hymns or Taize songs (pity; they could have added a couple, I reckon). Amazing Grace is there of course, and most of the others are fairly modern Hillsong-type worship-songs. So there’s a distinctly fundamentalist flavour about the whole thing (it’s ‘black gospel’ after all). Interspersed here and there are stories of ‘Jesus changing lives’ – all of them very moving.

The 300 faces of the choir-members range in colour from black to white to Asian and everything in between. They are dressed in glittering gold (the women) and ‘tuxedo black’ (the men).

The professionalism of the whole production – musically and choreographically – makes up for the simplistic words and tunes. Entertaining, and if you’re in the charismatic stream of the church, very worshipful. An excellent Christmas gift for someone who likes this kind of music.

Rowland Croucher

November 11, 2006

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