Janet Paschal - Genius

Janet Paschal, Genius
October 10, 2005 (re-printed from - http://averyfineline.com)

This is long overdue, … a post, that is, about Janet Paschal.

A while back I got her newest project, Home Again. I listened to it but had to put it aside for some reason and just stumbled across it recently on my iPod while I was shuffling music. What I realized (re)listening to it and her is how naturally she brings a sophisticated sense of style to such an expansive range of music. She has always done this, mind you. But it hasn't been until the last decade or so that she has really begun to fully inhabit a space of her own creating, one that isn't blocked and bounded by the silly preconceptions of one mindset (Southern Gospel, beginning with Capital Letters) or another (televangelism).

Paschal is a vocalist who has in middle age unbound herself from any fixed style or tradition and has focused on bringing a lyric and melodic material to where she is. In so doing, she has gerrymandered a market for herself among several subcultures and discrete traditions: gospel, praise and worship, inspirational, even probably choral and some CCM at their edges. For the latter-day phenomenon of the paradoxical broad-niche success of the kind Paschal has achieved, we have, of course, Bill Gaither's Homecoming revolution to sincerely thank. If there is a positive side-effect to Gaitherization, Paschal is the poster-child for it.

But Gaither has only provided the stage. Paschal has earned the curtain call all for herself. That she can make a song like "Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me" (to take a fine, fine example from her latest project) and revive it without resorting to gimmicky Brentwood-Jazz-like-arrangements or alienating audiences that expect such a song to sound hymnodic (yes, I made that up) exemplifies Paschal's deft touch as a stylist.

At other times, it's Paschal the interpreter most apparently at work, the perceptive student of silences and simply sung melodies who actively shapes the emotional content of her music in ways that only seasoned vocalists can successfully manage. In this latter category, see a song like "Uphill Climb" - a ballad that could easily turn into a three-hanky affair but that Paschal rescues from a schlocky fate by filling the song with tenderness.

With an IAG pandemic seemingly ravaging gospel music's female vocalists (and a few of the boys as well), Paschal reminds us of the value in tending the delicate poise that difficult material demands.

October 10, 2005 11:57 PM