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When too many singers' jaws start lagging behind, Tohamaso flashes a reminder -- a photo of a wide-open mouthed hippo. As a choir leader he's fun, not patronizing. At one point in rehearsal, he laughingly tells the choir not to clap along, but wait until he teaches them the correct gospel way.
"I don't think I can sing, clap and sway at the same time," newer choir member Lisa Wright worries in a later interview. Yet the Revenue Canada employee and mom is no first-time
choir-goer. In the past, she has sung with the Sweet Adelines, among others. "I mean I think I have rhythm," she says, not sounding so sure any more.
At most rehearsals, Tohamaso brings along a ringer -- a family member or one of the black singers from his three Vancouver choirs -- to hype the Victoria sound.
Some of the Florida-born man's musician friends are amused he's even trying to teach whites to sing black gospel-style.
"Maaan," they tease, "Do they know how to get on the 'one' (rhythm)?"
The barely two-year-old choir is somewhat rhythmically challenged, jokingly concedes Reisa Stone, but comparing it to the Whoopi Goldberg movie Sister Act, she says "we sound as good as she made those nuns."
As a vocal teacher, Stone is one of the few non-recreational singers in a choir that doesn't even bother with auditions and rarely performs publicly. The rubenesque blond has some history with the musical genre, once being the only white singer in a Montreal black gospel choir.
Stone loves the music, which is what brings most singers out Tuesday nights. It was the sound that Gord
Warrenchuk, 58, grew up with in Detroit. At least, it was what he heard on the
radio.
"In the late '50s and '60s, blacks and whites didn't mix," explains the computer analyst who, among the nine men at rehearsal, is the most adept at making the right Motown moves.
"The music I love to listen to has an African-American background," says Brooke Maxwell, a 33-year-old UVic education graduate who teaches part-time at Montessori. "This is a close as I can get on Vancouver Island to its roots."
A regular player on the Victoria jazz circuit, Maxwell questions whether Victoria realizes what a musical resource -- admittedly just two hours every other week -- it has in
Tohamaso. Wright is equally in awe of a man of Tohamaso's background, and even more by the fact someone such as her gets to sing with him. "What's he doing in Victoria with us?" she says.
Hers is a reasonable question. Tohamaso isn't here for the money. It's little more than an honorarium on top of his same-day ferry expenses, according to Maxwell, who collects the rehearsal $10 drop-in fees.
Some core choir members were first exposed to Tohamaso when he was featured several years ago at Victoria's old black cultural
centre. Ultimately, he's a performer, but he peppers his rehearsal with tidbits of black musical history. He easily traces what current performers like Aretha Franklin -- and even Whitney Houston -- do back through such gospel greats a Mahalia Jackson to the slaves' coded songs of oppression and freedom.
But Tohamaso isn't on a crusade to promote black culture so much as its soul. "What you want to do is spread the good news, stir up the soul in Victoria," says
Tohamaso. "You don't see it, but people are longing for it," he continues.
What Tohamaso is doing is in his words a spiritual thing, which when pushed he elaborates as "people getting encouraged, getting healed" by the spirit of the song.
There's little doubt something like that does happen during rehearsal. "It's absolutely therapeutic," says Wright. Stone agrees. 'If I'm not feeling well, I can go to rehearsal and feel better," she says, describing it as "a real spiritual feast."
The two-hour rehearsal is winding down, but only according to the clock. The choir is still building with the chorus: "I feel it in my head, I feel it in my feet, I feel it all over me."
Once the song ends, there's an exuberant pause.
"And that's soul. That's the real thing," Tomahaso tells his choir, adding the qualifier that traditional gospel choirs wouldn't stop just shy of 8 p.m., but keep going until midnight.
"But we can't do that. I've a ferry to catch," he says, ready to squeeze in one more gospel song first.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2005
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