You may have chosen to be somewhere other than 2200 Benjamin Avenue, The Ottawa Seventh Day Adventist Church, from 19:00 – 21:00 on Saturday, February 8, 2014. If you were elsewhere, may I suggest that you might have made an error? The Reverend Cheryle Hannah set the stage for the evening with a spoken word that lit up the room with poetic descriptions of the Negro Spiritual. The Black History Month concert presented this evening achieved the pinnacle of inspiration, authenticity, production quality and entertainment value. I suspect that nothing else presented this month will even approach the excellence of this program. A Zulu song opened the concert and had many people on their feet swaying to the music and clapping their hands. The pièce de résistance were the songs presented by the joint choirs of the Ottawa SDA Church and the Fourth Avenue Baptist Church. The uniting force was the dynamic Vanessa London-Lumpkin whose conducting was just about as entertaining as the wonderful singing. ‘Jesus Is A Rock’ was liberated from the song book by the youngest group of the evening: ‘Joyful Prayze’. This choir of teens and young adults convinced the room of the truth that Jesus is indeed the Rock. The music was of the finest quality spurring several people to say the the event should have been televised. Yes, indeed, it should have been preserved for posterity. Maybe next year one of the levels of government might see fit to fund the production of a high quality video of the event.
Submitted by Regius Brown
