O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : R&B; Singers Draw on Gospel Roots for Emotional Intensity

What the playground is to a pro basketball player, the church is to top-flight R&B; singers. It’s where you begin if you want to play in the big leagues.

Miki Howard and David Peaston are among the finest pop-R&B; singers of recent vintage, and it’s no accident that they both began by singing in gospel choirs. The whole purpose of religious music is to convey an inner experience of ardor and passion. On stage at the Celebrity Theatre Saturday night, Howard and Peaston both showed that they learned their early lessons well enough to carry that fervor over to songs of romantic love.

Howard, originally from Chicago, was a convincing romantic tragedian. After a slow beginning, her hourlong headlining set began to smolder with a streak of songs in which Howard cast herself as the lover spurned or ignored.

On “Baby, Be Mine,” Howard, elegant in a white suit, reached back to the church and turned the song into a keening prayer for romantic salvation. The dramatic set-piece ended with steamy uplift when one of Howard’s backing musicians joined her for a duet that answered her rising pleas with promises of physical consolation.

Howard kept the mood torchy and blue through a medley of blues and soul songs drawn from a series of precursors--Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin. The segment took on a bit of an archival cast, however, instead of emphasizing the timelessness of songs like “Stormy Weather.” The segment ended with Howard’s three backing singers crooning “Let’s go back to the blues,” lending it a false Vegas touch.

Howard quickly made up for that lapse with the deep-blue, late-night saloon singing of “You’ve Changed,” which came across with an immediacy that belied any notion that older material belongs on a museum shelf. After that long stretch of romantic woe, Howard tried to finish on an uplift. She undercut herself by summoning dozens of fans to the stage during “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do),” a Stevie Wonder song previously done by Aretha Franklin. The crowd surrounding Howard made for a festive mood on stage but left everyone else in the house feeling like an uninvited onlooker at a wedding party. Howard got the energy level back for her finale, “Love Under New Management.”

Throughout the show, Howard displayed her gospel-influenced ability to build passion by repeating phrases and stretching syllables over a multitude of notes. These fiery displays didn’t stray from the point of the songs and, therefore, never came off as mere show.

Peaston was far more inclined to grandstand than Howard. But even if he repeated his showiest vocal maneuvers too often, listening to this large, round mound of soul sound was still a treat (even amid some terrible sound distortion).

From Eddie Kendricks to Philip Bailey, most top R&B; tenors have sung with a smooth, creamy tone. What makes Peaston distinctive is the bite in his falsetto. He was able to sound thick and raspy even in his upper register--a knack that gave his singing exceptional body and vibrancy.

Peaston performed with a palpable warmth and sense of delight, arms waving and eyes popping. He used his bulk to his advantage. Occasionally, he would make a quip about it. More often he would just shake it. When a big man mambos--as the large Orange County blues singer Robert Lucas puts it in one of his songs--people pay attention. Peaston showed he could mambo with the best of them.

Peaston’s 65-minute show began with a false step into Vegas slickness, as his trio of backup singers crooned snippets of his songs as reverentially as if they were holy writ. But things soon were on track as Peaston moved from effective funk to a swinging, R&B; version of “God Bless the Child” to some well-executed straight blues.

It was encouraging to hear Howard and Peaston both drawing upon Billie Holiday’s legacy and doubly encouraging to hear both of them dip into the straight, traditional blues. R&B; has largely discarded the “B” since disco and techno-funk arrived about 15 years ago, and that neglect has cost it an inexhaustible wellspring for passion and character. It was nice to hear successful, contemporary pop-soul practitioners putting it back in the mix.

Troop, a singing and dancing ensemble of five youngsters from Pasadena, opened with a lightweight but energetic set of techno-funk. They combined hip-hop dance athletics with good vocal craftsmanship. But the backing vocals sounded suspiciously robust during some of the more heated dance maneuvers, when mere mortals would more likely be panting for breath than singing in perfect, swelling harmony. The guys in Troop may be cardiovascular wonders--or they may have been cheating by lip-syncing some of their parts to a tape. Only their sound engineer knows for sure.

The fact is that in the MTV age, not only is it hard to tell whether a performance is real or Memorex, but slipping ethics among video wonders like Janet Jackson and Milli Vanilli have made it common for so-called “live” acts to slide by on a prerecorded crutch. If Troop stands unjustly accused here, it’s because the shoddy standards of others render today’s dance-popsters as ethically suspect as politicians.

Singers like Howard and Peaston, who developed their crutch-free vocal chops in church, know what a lip-synced “live” performance is: It’s a sin.