Pierre Walker – Project: Sanctified – A Celebration of 19th Street

Pierre Walker and Various Artists
Project: Sanctified
Reunion Communion: A Celebration of 19th Street
Admatha Records (2009)
http://www.myspace.com/projectsanctified

Reviewed by Bob Marovich for The Black Gospel Blog.

Speaking of the Walker Family…

In 2002, Pierre Walker, Rev. Clay Evans’ organist and St. Sabina’s associate minister of music, paid tribute to the family’s Chicago roots on Rev. Clay Evans Presents Project: Sanctified.

Two years later, Pierre recorded a second Project: Sanctified, this time as a loving acknowledgment of the church he grew up in, Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Philadelphia, where the pastor is his father, Rev. Charles Walker.

Nineteenth Street has served the City of Brotherly Love for more than a century.  In the past forty years alone, its pulpit has welcomed such honored guests as Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., Dr. Howard Thurman, Bishop O.T. Jones and Dr. Fred Shuttlesworth.

The mix of music on the 2004 Project: Sanctified, released in 2009, is steeped in the African American church tradition. Eschewing the now-standard practice of combining P&W, contemporary, traditional and urban on a gospel release, Project: Sanctified instead offers a soundtrack of an historic Old Landmark.

Opening with the somber strains of a snippet of Rev. Walker’s Requiem for Brother Martin, a classical tribute to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the album also features deacon-led congregational singing (“Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand”), nineteenth-century hymnody (“I Need Thee”), traditional gospel (“Just to Behold His Face”) and a couple of choir-led pulse-racers, including “Grace,” J.C. White’s hit for the Institutional Radio Choir.

The album’s track order follows the standard order of service, with devotionals; a sermon song with Rev. Walker, who also provides the lesson; an altar call; and the benediction.

The Walker Family is all-in: Pierre is joined by his talented vocalist brother Jason and the angel of Nineteenth Street, their father, Rev. Charles. The project pays homage to the family’s Chicago heritage, with Windy City-based artists such as the Brown Sisters, Gus Lacy and Joey Woolfalk assisting with the recording.  

The project’s high point is Pierre’s stunning rendition of Lucie Campbell’s “Just to Behold His Face.” In Pierre’s voice one hears a measure of Donald Gay’s muscular jazz phrasing as the dynamics build to such high tension that only a praise break provides release.

Gospel music today has a polished, musically complex sensibility in keeping with a world captivated by iPods and enraptured by multi-media praise services and megachurch celebrations. Project: Sanctified reminds us that in the midst of musical evolution, thousands of Old Landmarks in cities large and small sound just like Nineteenth Street. They embrace the future without abandoning the rich, textured intensity of the songs that carried their forebears through.

Four of Five Stars

Picks: “Grace,” “Just to Behold His Face.”