Sunday Music_111520

Bless the Mad featuring Edson Sean, "Show Me the Way"

Growing up, I didn’t go to church all that often (cue: Soviet atheism), but when I got to America, I did recognize from an early age that spirituality was an ingredient of the records I loved. Not just how praise music thematically aligned itself with a power behind life’s mysteries and the certainty of something greater, but the obvious echoes of the Black church voices, melodies and chords throughout the American and British rock and roll I loved. (And even more so in the disco and soul and R&B and country I’d be eating up very soon.) Little of it seemed directed at, or a directive from God, whose existence was misplaced pretty early on in my forest of sound, but the sonic echoes of the spirit came clear; especially after the tensions and social histories of Saturday nights and Sunday mornings became my sacred texts. Finding clear evidence of holy spirit in secular music has been a constant digger goal ever since, first acknowledging a specific kind of “punk” Catholicism, then Baptist dance-floor exclamations, electric-kool-aid-spiked progressive visions, and, when lucky, something weird and personal and beyond categorization. (Well, maybe “purple.”)

The older I got, the more I recognized that regarding almost any music as “secular” was deeply flawed — as incorrect as the notion that the separation between church and state meant capital-G white dude with white beard, painted on the church ceiling and cited on the legal tender was not actually written into American laws for the benefit of the ruling constituents. Except that the holy spirit’s role in the holistic whole of America’s musical universe — where the Black community’s house of worship remains the best (often, the only) music school available — reads as contrary to organized religion’s effect on Constitutional ideals (or, especially, the document’s realities). The spirit embodied in this music is tied to a set of humanist ethics which undercut celebrity rapture and capitalism’s unrepentant avarice, sometimes clearly, sometimes obliquely. What better touchstone to simultaneously project grounding autobiography and aspirational ascendance — which is what "Show Me the Way," a gospel cover on an incredible new album by Chicago multi-instrumentalist duo Bless the Mad (itself a citation of spirituality’s glory), does. The Christian reading of the lyric, revolving around Edson Sean’s delivery of the phrases “show me the way Lord” and “I needed you” is fairly limited: salvation. But appearing early on Bless The Mad, it feels more like a doorway to the album’s narrative — think a variation of Standing on the Corner’s lo-fi, artful mix of jazz, hip-hop, soul and history. The Chicago location ties the gospel spirituality and gorgeous background harmonies (c/o Sean and Arin Maya) to the local vocal-group traditions of people like Curtis Mayfield’s Impressions, connecting church conversations and street conversation, a feeling that Bless the Mad’s throwback-production compounds. It’s Sunday music that gets you ready for the rest of the week, spiritual music that prepares you for the physical world, akin to prayer, with all the trappings, minus the religiosity.

MORE on Bless the Mad from Leor Galil at the Chicago Reader