The Fredösphere

Soon I will join the teeming ranks of scanner owners.  I had no idea scanners were so cheap (I'm paying $40, including shipping) and I'm embarrassed it took me so long to get one.  As my buddy Victor said, no doubt we'll soon see a Gallery of Regrettable Choral Music showing up at the Fredösphere. Take 6.  So, they're still at it, eh?  I remember hearing their debut album back in the ... late 80s, was it?  I was stunned that an a cappella group could sound like a jazz band.  The countertenors sang like trumpets and the bass sounded like a, um, bass.  (But you know what I mean:  a bass.)  Much later, I saw them live, warming up for the Neville Brothers, and they sang a very long improvisation over a human beat-box rhythm, and I'm sad to say the whole experiment failed to move me.  Have they since un-jumped the shark?  That their official web site lists two, count 'em, two Christmas albums augurs not well, but this track from their 2002 album Beautiful World sounds like the good old days.  (Here's a complete downloadable version that didn't make the album.) More from the first article:

Take 6's tuneful trail leads to Ruby Diamond Auditorium on Saturday for a concert presented by Seven Days of Opening Nights. McKnight, the older brother of popular R&B performer Brian McKnight, said the program will feature a mix of new material and hits from the group's two-decade, award-studded career.

That "Seven Days" is a joke or some amazing coincidence.  Although their vibe is mainstream evangelical Christian, all the members of Take 6 are Seventh Day Adventists.  I don't know about you, but according to my upbringing, the Adventists were definitely not in the fold. They were sheep of another pasture, in fact, sheep of another, very weird, pasture. Nowadays, I would characterize the Adventists as orthodox-plus, where the plus is a few cultural distinctives like worship on Saturday, and set of founding documents which prophesied the return of Christ on a particular date in history.  (Oh dear.)  Once that date came and went, the group suffered a crisis, and when the dust settled, they finessed the whole thing in a pretty unconvincing way.  More recently the movement appears to have split into various factions and has become hard to pin down (from an outsider's point of view).  Eschatological enthusiasms:  will people ever learn?  No.