World Premiere • Live Concert Recording
Brian Blade is “the most imaginatively supple drummer in jazz” (New York Times). He learned his trade hitting rhythm at Shreveport’s Zion Baptist, where his father — the spine-shaking Pastor Brady Blade, Sr. — presides. In New Orleans, Brian partnered with Lanois (producer of U2 & Bob Dylan) to devise a gospel project that culminates here.
In this once-in-a-lifetime event, the drummer, the producer, and the drummer’s father convene in Durham to cut a live album driven by Pastor Blade. They’re joined by bus-fulls of churchgoers from Shreveport and the sharpest sidemen in the business.
On Saturday night there’s a live recording; on Sunday morning a sermon by Pastor Blade; and on Sunday evening, another live performance. All of it unfolds at Hayti, once an A.M.E church and now a deconsecrated chapel whose Jim Crow-era walls create acoustics better than any studio’s.
Organized by Duke to happen in Durham, this landmark event in music unearths the rapture at the core of modern art, two days of hands-in-the-air music that, on wax, will never die.