United in Song 2022: Ringing In the New Year Together (Nouveau Productions, American "Pops" Orchestra, PBS-TV,. 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched all but the first 15 minutes of a peculiar PBS New Year’s special called United in Song 2022: Ringing In the New Year Together. It was an oddly frustrating program in that instead of the usual New York Philharmonic concert with which PBS rings in the new year, it was a concert led by the American “Pops” Orchestra and its director, Luke Frazier, in a not very digestible blend of light classics, standards (“Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Que Será, Será” and a nice ballroom dance by Tiler Peck and Román Mejia to an instrumental version of “I’ll Be Seeing You”), 1970’s pop hits (like “Make Your Own Kind of Music” sung by someone or something called MILCK, all caps and with an extra “c”), some things that sounded like originals and quite a lot of Christian rock. The “inspirational” selections reneged from old spirituals like “Ain’t That Good News” (sung by a large Black man named Reginald Smith, Jr., who seemed to be trying to be a latter-day Paul Robeson; he wasn’t anywhere near Robeson’s league but he was still quite good) and “It Is Well with My Soul” (sung by Natalie Grant, who seemed to be trying to emulate her near-namesake Amy Grant) to contemporary Christian music like “In Better Hands” (also sung by Natalie Grant), Matt Doyle’s “One Song Glory” and MILCK’s “I Belong.” By far the best piece on the show was Jazmine Sullivan’s “Let It Burn” in a scorching performance by Joaquina Kalukango. I was unable to note down that jumble of consonants that make up her last name, but I was quite impressed with the power and majesty of her performance – especially by comparison with the musical pap that surrounded her.

There was also a nice performance of a song called “Mercy” sung by Brett Young, who looked like the young George Clooney and gave this show a boost aesthetically as well as musically. There were also a couple if feints in the classical direction, including a clarinet sonata (one movement, composer unidentified) by Ricardo Morales with orchestra (apparently no one told these people that a “sonata” is a work for just one or two instruments, a featured instrument plus piano) and an arrangement of the folk song “Shenandoah” by Jacqueline Schwards on piano that was quite lovely as a solo piece, less so when the ubiquitous orchestra came in. The gimmick was that the show was performed at three separate locales, all in out-of-the-way places: the People’s Bank Theatre in Marietta, Ohio; the Strand Theatre in Marietta, Georgia (one wonders if they deliberately picked two venues with “Marietta” in their names) and the Egyptian Theatre on Boise, Idaho. For the finale featured choirs from all three locales (the one at Boise State University is called, of all things, the “Meistersingers”!) electronically blended with Luke Frazier conducting all of them simultaneously in the song “How Can I Keep from Singing?” I remember first hearing this song on a 1960’s benefit LP for the listener-supported radio station KPFA in Berkeley by Pete Seeger and being moved – and then disappointed when one of Charles’s Quaker friends told me they’d sung it in church so often they called it, “How Can I Keep from Snoring?”