Music Review | Edwin Hawkins And Eric Reed: At The Intersection Of Sacred And Secular

The gospel singer Edwin Hawkins, famous for the song “Oh Happy Day,” which put an R&B arrangement on an old hymn and became a hit in 1969, grew up with jazz in his house, through his parents’ record collection. He said he has been interested in singing secular standards ever since, though he’s not known for it.

Conversely, the jazz pianist Eric Reed grew up with gospel in his house: he played in his father’s Baptist church in Philadelphia. A few years ago the two musicians decided to act on their overlapping interests to make a true jazz-gospel crisscross, something that could be a natural occurrence in black American culture but doesn’t surface as often as you might think.

The beginning of their first set together at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room on Friday night seemed to demonstrate why. Mr. Reed brought his own acoustic jazz quartet; Mr. Hawkins brought three local gospel singers, as well as another keyboardist, Lawrence Johnson, who played organ and synthesizer next to Mr. Reed on piano.

This set up a tricky situation. Mr. Reed had a flexible drummer and bass player, but Mr. Hawkins needed synthesized percussion to set the tempo and rhythmic feeling for each song; the drummer, Willie Jones, had to wear headphones to follow it all.

Mr. Hawkins sang in his restrained, reassuring, elegant voice; the rhythms, on gospel songs he has recorded since the ’70s, like “Testify” and “The Comforter,” were uptempo funk with stressed upbeats, or smoothed-out ballads with a groove established by electronic triangle and chime sounds. At points the compromise was defeating the whole purpose of using jazz musicians at all. A cloud of discomfort darkened the gig; maybe the aesthetic differences were insurmountable.

Then the real crossover came. The backing singers and Mr. Johnson went away. As a transition between religious and secular music, the band played “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and darker, Donny Hathaway-like, chest-voice sounds came through in Mr. Hawkins’s singing. Finally Mr. Hawkins waded right in. He sang Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)” decently. But then he sang “My Funny Valentine” excellently.

“My Funny Valentine” is about navel-gazing and earthly desire (although if the valentine is the singer’s “favorite work of art,” who’s the artist?), and Mr. Hawkins kept it that way. He focused, and his light voice expanded through projected long tones, radiating outward in waves, rather than punching through the sound of the band. It gave Mr. Reed a boost; he played the smartest, drollest solo of the night.

Back to gospel. With the full band and backing singers again, the band played “God Will Take Care of You,” and finally Mr. Hawkins’s great hit, “Oh Happy Day.” He sang it for a while, but then one of the backup singers, Melonie Daniels, took over, and through a couple of choruses she took care of all the things Mr. Hawkins chose not to do: working up to a shriek, making her voice passionately abrasive, clobbering the audience.

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