Cappella

Let Gibson keep its guitars, and Steinway its pianos. Just give Bernice Johnson Reagon a voice, and she'll make music. Tomorrow, Reagon and her ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock, will make music at the Academy of Music. The closest thing to an instrument on stage will be the clapping hands of the group's five singers. They do it a cappella. Reagon traces her interest in a cappella to her Georgia youth, during which she sang in the classroom, in the schoolyard, and at church without instruments.

It's one thing for an artist to claim divine inspiration. It's quite another thing to show evidence of it, as Take 6 did Sunday at the Academy of Music. The male a cappella sextet, composed of young Seventh-Day Adventists from Alabama, asked the audience members to act as if they were in church, and the crowd, which began calling out at the first note and kept it up throughout the evening, gladly complied. The group, which collaborates on its arrangements, unfurled a harmonic complexity unrivaled in pop and gospel.

Inquirer television critic Jonathan Storm is reporting from the television critics' press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif. These items are taken from his blog, "Eye of the Storm," at www.philly.com/eyeof-thestorm . The subway is not just for getting to the Phillies games. For Shawn Stockman and his singing group, Boyz II Men, it was a concert hall. "You know, when me and my guys got together, we used to sing in the streets of Philadelphia," Stockman told TV critics Monday.

Asentiment first expressed by the Persuasions way back when will be reiterated Sunday, May 14, when the Africamericas Festival presents "We Don't Need No Music" - a concert of a cappella singing and poetry. Two-time Grammy Award winners Take 6 will headline the show, which also features the internationally acclaimed Sweet Honey in the Rock and local a cappella artists Nanikha. Poets Rikki Lights, Lamont Steptoe and Kimmika Williams fill out the bill. Tickets for the concert, at the Uptown Theatre, 2240 N. Broad St., are $10, $5 for children.

The leaps-and-bounds success story of the a cappella group Take 6 is unlike anything else that has hit the music world in recent years. Consider what has happened to the six vocalists since their first, self- titled album was released on Reprise in March 1988: They won two of the three Grammys for which they were nominated (best gospel performance for their song "Spread Love" and best jazz vocal group for their album Take Six). They played two dates at Radio City Music Hall in New York with Stevie Wonder, who bought 200 CDs of their album to distribute to friends.

In this age of high-powered instrumentation, recording-studio wizardry and high-tech ears, there is still a place for the most basic musical sounds of all - a cappella. You know the stuff. A bunch of guys - five is the ideal number - hanging on a street corner and harmonizing one of the good old numbers, frequently something from a 1920s or '30s movie. You don't find much of it any more. Nowadays, if you spot a delegation of young men on a street corner, you probably head in another direction.

By the time he discarded it late in the performance, the shirt was dark green, saturated by his sweat. Dube (pronounced doo-BAY) is one of the leading figures in African reggae and is a hard-working man. On stage, the elflike, dreadlocked Johannesburg native is an aerobic wonder, jumping, dancing and thrashing at a high pace. He is also a throwback. Dube has little use for the electronics prevalent in the dance-hall style popular in the '90s. His 12-piece band, with its keening, pulsating organ, its trio of female backup singers and three horn players, is more adept at the earthier, spiritual style of the mid-to-late '70s and early '80s.

This movie must be a family affair because there's no way Ben Stiller or Jason Schwartzman would get involved in a project this dreadful unless they were doing a favor for a relative. The awkwardly named (and awkwardly everything else) Marc Pease Experience joins Hamlet 2 and TV's Glee as recent explorations of teenage losers straining to be performers. (Gee, do you think some Hollywood writers are trying to expiate painful periods from their own youth?) The titular protagonist (Schwartzman)

Play a little Chess at the Players Club of Swarthmore. The Tim Rice musical pits two chess champs - an American and a Soviet - against each other. At stake is the love of a woman. Show times are 8 p.m. today, tomorrow and Saturday; Wednesday to April 8 and April 12 to 15, and 2 p.m. Sunday and April 9. Admission is $12 and $15, and $5 for students with ID. The Players Club is on Fairview Road, off Route 320. Call 610-328-4271. Chilean poet and human-rights activist Marjorie Agosin will read from her recently published book, A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile, at 4 p.m. tomorrow at Swarthmore College.

Toward the end of Avenue X, the mettlesome, effervescent musical that opened Wednesday at the Wilma Theater, the two young men at the plot's center meet on a Brooklyn subway platform. They're en route to a talent show at which they plan to debut as an a cappella duo, but they can't agree on what to sing. And so, awaiting the D train, they begin to ad-lib a brand-new tune, bouncing riffs and lyrics off one another and creating, on the spot, a fusion of the two kinds of music that serve them as badges of identity.

"All right, boys," Rich Gray announces as 20 fellows in tuxes arrange themselves in rows. "We're going to air out the songs a bit," he says. "We're going to tune up the performance, work out the kinks - and get some feedback from the lovely ladies who've come here tonight. " Welcome to a rehearsal of the Pine Barons Chorus, those durable and personable practitioners of the a cappella art of barbershop harmonies in South Jersey. Soon, they'll be delivering Valentines of song to other people's sweethearts.

Inquirer television critic Jonathan Storm is reporting from the television critics' press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif. These items are taken from his blog, "Eye of the Storm," at www.philly.com/eyeof-thestorm . The subway is not just for getting to the Phillies games. For Shawn Stockman and his singing group, Boyz II Men, it was a concert hall. "You know, when me and my guys got together, we used to sing in the streets of Philadelphia," Stockman told TV critics Monday.

The a cappella group Men of Note has been gathering awards over the years for Cherry Hill High School West. But the Men of Note that will turn up in December on the NBC competition series The Sing-Off has singers who are truly men - not high schoolers. In the spring, eight West alums got together, hoping they would go far by creating a Men of Note "all-star team," says Richard Crandle , a 2008 grad who was touring with the show Hairspray . His fellow performers are Kurt Knecht , Bobby Waldner , Jason Nop , Rajeer Alford , Kevin Cantanella , Michael Williams , and Perry Hudicka . Crandle credits choir director Christine Bass for the group's success.

IT'S PROBABLY a good thing I enjoyed a recent performance by Straight No Chaser , the 10-voice a cappella group that is spending July and August at Harrah's Resort Atlantic City. That's because I fear that giving the unit a bad review is akin to slamming motherhood, the Fourth of July or puppies. That's just how wholesome and downright likable SNC is. The score of male singers, so clean cut they make Justin Bieber seem menacing, deals in classic vocal harmonizing. The twist, if there is one, is that the group's repertoire includes material not usually associated with the a cappella format.

Christina Pasick has a special memory of the Christmas concert in the dementia unit. The patients at the LIFE day-care center in West Philadelphia were staring silently when she and other members of the Penn Med UltraSounds a cappella group started to sing. But gradually as the medical students raised their voices on such tunes as "Silent Night," they drew out decades-old memories, and the patients started singing, too. "They were the first words they had spoken in months," said Pasick, 22, a first-year University of Pennsylvania medical student from Wall Township, N.J. "The nurses were crying.

This movie must be a family affair because there's no way Ben Stiller or Jason Schwartzman would get involved in a project this dreadful unless they were doing a favor for a relative. The awkwardly named (and awkwardly everything else) Marc Pease Experience joins Hamlet 2 and TV's Glee as recent explorations of teenage losers straining to be performers. (Gee, do you think some Hollywood writers are trying to expiate painful periods from their own youth?) The titular protagonist (Schwartzman)

A little a cappella and a lot of gospel, haunting artifacts and heroic ancestors, joyful celebrations and somber commemorations are the hallmarks of Black History Month. Local observances will peak with a musical festival today at 30th Street Station and a series of exhibits and tributes next weekend at the Convention Center. And both are among the free celebrations offered in this region. At the Pathmark Black History Month Celebration today, radio and TV personality Diane Brown will emcee a program described as traditional music of the African American community on a stage in the train station's North Waiting Room.

In this age of high-powered instrumentation, recording-studio wizardry and high-tech ears, there is still a place for the most basic musical sounds of all - a cappella. You know the stuff. A bunch of guys - five is the ideal number - hanging on a street corner and harmonizing one of the good old numbers, frequently something from a 1920s or '30s movie. You don't find much of it any more. Nowadays, if you spot a delegation of young men on a street corner, you probably head in another direction.

It's raining. It's Philadelphia. It's 'round midnight on a Saturday in January. And there's a line of umbrellas - a line of 20, 30, certainly more than a few people - standing in the rain waiting to get inside the Hard Rock Cafe at 12th and Market Streets. This is new. On the same night about the same time there was a line of one or two outside the door of the Khyber on Second Street near Chestnut, where owner Steve Simons was working the door - and, regretfully, turning away those willing to pay the $6 cover charge.

Boyz II Men gets a hit with an a cappella version of "In the Still of the Night. " Take 6 wins a Grammy for an entire a cappella album. And the Persuasions - who broke ground for groups like Take 6 and Boyz II Men and Rockapella and the Mint Juleps - go unrecognized by the music industry and mainstream audiences. Why? "We don't see it that way," says lead singer Jerry Lawson, 54, resting between gigs here. "When we started out, there was really just us. Hey, now there are over 400 a cappella groups out there, and it just makes me feel so good.