Lisa Knowles & the Brown Singers: Experience the Evolution – Live

Lisa Knowles & the Brown Singers of Memphis, Tennessee
Experience the Evolution – Live (2008)
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By Bob Marovich for The Black Gospel Blog.

On their live CD, Alescia “Lisa” Knowles & the Brown Singers of Memphis, Tennessee put joie de vivre in gospel music performance.

The ladies don’t employ melodrama, complex jazz chords or meditative moments. Experience the Evolution – Live is uncomplicated foot-patting, hand-clapping traditional gospel music. Or, as Lisa notes at the beginning of the floor-thumping “I Need You Lord Jesus,” “little country church” music.

Don’t let their angelic faces fool you: the Brown Singers are cut from the same mold as the Lumzy Sisters and the McDonald Sisters — hard-singing congregation rousers — and they demonstrate their prowess at the 2007 program at Memphis’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the CD was recorded live. Whether raising the rafters with Darrell Pettis and S.I.P. on “So Much,” or supporting “grandmother” Willie Mae Richmond on the quartet-style “Get on Your Knees and Pray,” the ladies have church. The live recording audience has church. The CD listeners have church.

Good church includes testimony. “He Made a Way” features Vanessa Knowles providing a hard-shouting recap of her victory over cancer. The mid-tempo hand-clapper “The Storm is Over Now” finds Lisa declaring “the devil thought he had me, but I’m coming out.”

A few contemporary gospel songs such as “Hold On” and “God Can” are interspersed for good measure but although they are contemporary in musical style, their lyrics traverse traditional territory by offering encouragement and reminders of the power of faith.

With Experience the Evolution – Live, Lisa Knowles & the Brown Singers offer a refreshing helping of exciting, invigorating and soul-stirring gospel music.

Five of Five Stars

Picks: “So Much,” “Zion.”