Rev. Vince Anderson Live at Black Betty, Brooklyn NY 3/3/08

After seeing Serena Jost’s triumphant performance at Joe’s Pub, winding down was not an option. Rev. Vince Anderson’s weekly gospel show at Black Betty proved to be the perfect choice of detour. By about a quarter after eleven, he’d already begun his first set and was jamming out on a funky gospel groove, using the very authentic-sounding Hammond B3 setting on his Nord Electro keyboard. It was like wandering into a random bar and seeing Jimmy Smith in mid-set. And it looks like the NYU Class of 2012 has discovered Rev. Vince. If this particular sampling is any indication, this class dances. Which is a great thing. At first glance, it was impossible to tell the faux-bohemians from the faux-faux-bohemians. But a second glance revealed a clear distinction: the real faux-bohemians maintain their habitually stoned distance. The fake phonies’ intoxicant of choice is Jagermeister.

Faux-bohemianism has been commodified to the point that any rat from a mall with an Urban Outfitters can declare himself or herself a trendoid. And now there are even European trendoids wandering Williamsburg, casting icky looks at the remaining nonwhite establishments, murmuring to each other in French slang. And old trendoids too! Fat, graying old guys who had the good sense to get out of dotcom stocks before the bubble burst, then eight years down the road dumped the wife and kids and can now be seen in fullblown midlife crisis with a gold-digging girl (or boy) from Pratt on the arm, gazing upward in search of “for sale” signs on the dark towers of Mordor across the park from Bedford. Being a trendoid was never anything more than a pose, anyway. It’ll be good to be rid of the whole thing. Passion is the new detachment! Excitement is the new boredom! And Rev. Vince is leading the way, with the class of 2012 in tow.

As the Rev. told the audience, if an interviewer wants to talk about church, and their first question is about a parishioner, good things are happening. He’d been interviewed a couple of days previously, and the first thing the writer asked him was about one particular “parishioner” who regularly shows up every week and dances deliriously for practically three hours, as long as the Rev. and his band are onstage. Tonight happened to be the guy’s birthday. He’s not someone you’d mistake for a dancer if you saw him on the street: he’s a pretty hefty dude who looks like he spends his non-dancing hours lying around eating bags and bags of junk food. But the Rev., who as recently as a year ago tipped the scales at over two hundred pounds, apparently sees a kindred spirit in him. Like his mentor, the Rev. works in mysterious ways, and instead of offering a hale, hearty HAPPY BIRTHDAY, he needled the guy. “Don’t be afraid,” he cautioned him, launching into the reliable crowd-pleaser Bon Voyage, the boisterous tale of an Irish wake, from Anderson’s first album. Anderson brought the birthday kid up with him behind the keyboard and eventually handed him the microphone, taking a mincing, somewhat sarcastic piano solo on the high keys that was straight out of Mozart – or Liberace. In an impressively penetrating falsetto, the big dude led the the ladies in the audience in a call-and-response. Now this guy is anything but a trendoid. Dancing with wild abandon in front of a crowd of sneering anorexics takes a lot of guts if you are the antithesis of what they are, and Anderson seized on this. A church where a big fat dancing guy with a falsetto is welcome is simply a great place to be. It’s our kind of church, and this was our kind of show.

And the band was great as always. They did a soulful, slowly crescendoing take of Anderson’s new song about the breakup of a longtime relationship and a long, sizzling, completely funked-out version of his song Come to the River, rising to delirious heights. The horn section of Dave Smith on trombone and Paula Henderson on baritone sax alternated between subtlety and exuberance, and Anderson was in particularly wild, frenetic mode on the keys. If there’s any criticism of how this band has developed, it’s that Henderson doesn’t get to take as many solos as she used to now that they have the trombone. But that’s what her band Moisturizer is for.