Los Angeles Festival,”Home,Place and Memory”, A citywide Art Fest : Sacred Landmarks Are Music to the Ears : Arts: Churches and temples are venues for concerts that may run counter to their culture. But congregations have welcomed these events with full houses.

The audience at Wilshire Boulevard Temple--a soaring architectural landmark that is home to Los Angeles’ first Jewish congregation--loved a recent Los Angeles Festival concert there featuring the Sweet Singing Cava-Leers, a group that performs traditional and contemporary gospel music.

Well, except maybe for all that singing about Jesus.

Rabbi Harvey S. Fields acknowledges that many in the crowd gathered at the Jewish temple one recent Sunday had come because of their membership in the temple’s congregation or because the Bukharan Jewish Ensemble Shashmaqam was also on the program. And he notes that a few were startled to find themselves confronted with gospel music--and as one irate concert-goer put it, too much of “the J-word”--in the temple.

But, the rabbi also noted, the audience stayed--and that willingness illustrates the point of the temple’s decision to be part of the Los Angeles Festival’s ongoing Sacred Landmarks Concert Series, which is bringing world music concerts to churches and synagogues all over metropolitan Los Angeles.

Sites include Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in East Los Angeles, Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church, St. Anne Melkite Greek-Catholic Church in North Hollywood and Los Angeles’ Second Baptist Church.

“We did not ask for any kind of litmus test of what would be performed,” Fields said. “I think that there were some people who may not have known who the Sweet Singing Cava-Leers were, and were a little surprised. But on the other hand, that’s precisely what we are doing in terms of the Los Angeles Festival, to surprise people with the universals within the particulars. We had total faith that whatever it turned out to be would be an enormously enriching confluence of culture.”

Be it due to faith, a “confluence of culture” or free admission, the Sacred Landmarks Series is emerging as one of the most successful elements of the 1993 Los Angeles Festival. It’s a summer box-office success story that won’t be recorded in the show-biz trade papers--but in cynical Los Angeles, a lot of people are suddenly showing up for church and temple.

No one is more surprised than the festival’s music curator, Robert Wisdom, or Martin Fleischmann, who is line producer for the series. Over lunch last week at Joe’s Diner in Santa Monica, both men said that, instead of controlling the stage as they might normally do as music producers, they found themselves standing back as the concerts took on a life of their own.

“I feel like I’m shedding a skin,” said Wisdom, who has held positions as director of performing arts at the London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, artistic director of New York’s Kitchen Center and artistic director of the New Music America Festival in Washington, D.C., before coming to work with this festival in fragile post-riot Los Angeles.

“I thought that the role of the festival was to create bridges, to elevate the role of spirituality and the sacred in neighborhoods and communities,” Wisdom said. “But I found that we had to come to terms with the amount of real pain that is here, and fear as a result of that pain.

“It’s no longer about big rhetorical statements--that won’t do. We have to focus on the specifics, like going into a church. We have to leave it open, and just let it happen.”

Wisdom and Fleischmann added that the concerts are intended to redefine the word sacred, occasionally opting for the irreverence rather than piety in their musical choices. “One shouldn’t have to define whether music is secular or sacred,” Fleischmann said. “You shouldn’t have to differentiate between just getting a kick out of a concert, or getting closer to God because the music took you there.”

Dr. Maher Hathout is chairman of the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles, which co-presented a concert that featured some Arab performers at All Saints Church. He said that places of worship add another dimension to performances that could not be found in a theater.

“The environment, the general environment is that this is different,” he said. “It is not just entertainment, it is a human experience. You go to any of these forums, and you go there with a certain predisposition that you are going there to open up to people, and to hug the human experience.”

Festival artistic director Peter Sellars noted that “it is very important that those concerts are free, like the services within those buildings. These are all offerings. These places are zones where everybody feels welcome and comfortable, and able to speak and feel the deepest human emotion.”

Father Richard Siebenand of Our Lady of Lourdes Church believes that having an event not just in a church, but in the neighborhood rather than at a downtown arts center, meant a lot to his congregation. And “they (audiences) come from other parts of town as well--they can see that East Los Angeles is not as bad as everybody thinks,” Siebenand said.

Festival officials report that as of Sept. 1, all of the Sacred Landmarks concerts were full houses, except for an Aug. 26 event at Second Baptist Church featuring Ali Jihad Racy, a UCLA professor of ethnomusicology who performs music of the Near East on traditional Arab instruments, and Flamenco guitarist Gino D’Auri. That performance fell slightly short with an audience of just over 1,000 in the 1,300-seat church.

While other concerts have drawn audiences largely from their surrounding communities, an audience member at that Second Baptist Church concert said that the wildly enthusiastic crowd did not include many from the church’s predominantly African-American congregation or the neighborhood, but was an assembly of “the usual culture vultures”--some of whom, festival officials observe, seem to be following the series around the city.

The music has not been religious in any traditional sense--nor has it necessarily reflected the ethnicity of the local congregations. St. Anne’s, for example, a place of worship for the Middle Eastern community, presented Harmonica Fats & the Blues Players, Geggy Tah, and the Jalapenos, a hip-hop, rap and doo-wop group from South-Central Los Angeles. Most concerts have featured musicians representing at least two different ethnic groups or geographical areas.

“It was like Christmas Eve,” observed the Rev. Tim Safford of All Saints Church the morning after the church’s second concert, which presented Yemenite Jewish dancer-composer Margalit Oved, Iranian musician Manoochehr Sadeghi and Vashti, a multicultural percussion group organized by the festival.

Safford said that many audience members were drawn out of loyalty to the church or an interest in supporting the Los Angeles Festival, rather than familiarity with the artists. “When I read the list of who was going to perform at All Saints, I did not know a single one of them, and they sounded weird to me,” Safford confessed. “Most people from the Anglo Pasadena church-going community don’t know who these performers are. But they come, and they are mesmerized, and transformed. It’s been great.

“Last night, during my introduction, I was impressed that when I said that we welcome the Islamic community, and our Jewish brothers and sisters, people of other religions, and that the more often we have gatherings like this, the more it will promote peace and justice, the whole place started to applaud. The way we learn about Los Angeles, especially after the Rodney King verdict, is always negative . . . what these (concerts) are is positives.

“Two nights ago, we had Rev. Jesse Jackson in the church, to a full house. And he said, when we think of Reginald Denny, we focus on the beating, not on the four African-Americans who jumped out of the car to save him. I feel a little bit the same way about the Los Angeles Festival. We live in a very diverse community where we can get along.”

* The remaining Sacred Landmarks concerts are: Tuesday: All Saints Church, 132 Euclid Ave., Pasadena. Francisco Aguabella y Su Grupo Oriza and Francis Awe’s Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble.

Wednesday: St. Anne Melkite Church, 11211 Moorpark, North Hollywood. Kobla Ladzekpo’s Zadonu African Music & Dance Co. and Marimba Ecos De Chiapas-Familia Cruz.

Thursday: Second Baptist Church, 2112 Griffith Ave., Los Angeles. Cahuilla Bird Singers, Sweet Singing Cava-Leers.

Friday: Our Lady of Lourdes, 3772 E. 3rd St., East Los Angeles, Chatuye, Ixim.

Sept. 15: St. Anne Melkite Church. Simon Shaheen, Vashti.

Sept. 16: Second Baptist Church . James Makubuya and Kiyira Ensemble, Joshkun Tamer Turkish Orchestra, Moving Pictures

All concerts are at 8 p.m.

L.A. FESTIVAL

TODAY

* AFRICAN MARKETPLACE(Rancho Cienega Park, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.). Open-air stages, daily parades, costumed drummers, dancers and storytellers, traditional artisans and tastes of black and African cuisine are featured at this eighth annual celebration of African-American creativity and heritage. Featuring KPFK’s “Roots of Rap,” at noon.

* TRINH T. MINH-HA(Museum of Flying, Santa Monica. 7:30 p.m.). The feminist writer and filmmaker discusses the pervasive themes of identity, authenticity and difference in the context of a female living tradition as part of the “Women’s Voices” series. Her film “REASSEMBLAGE,” a study of women in rural Senegal, is screened.

* “TALES OF TWO MOSQUES”(Nuart, Santa Monica. 7:30 p.m.). In this film, Muslims in Canada try to retain their heritage while fully participating in North American life. With “FINAL SOLUTION,” about the Muslim impact on the arts and history of Spain. “DOOR TO THE SKY” (9:30 p.m.). A young woman returns to Morocco to visit her dying father and discovers a spiritual longing to return to her homeland.

* “STORIES OF SURVIVAL” film series. “NO REGRETS”(Museum of Tolerance, 7:30 p.m.). In this film by Marlon Riggs, five African-American gay men cope with HIV. Co-presented by the Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition. Also the 30-minute “DEAF HEAVEN,” chronicling one day in the life of Paul Hudson, a young man whose lover is lost in dementia in the final stages of AIDS.

Readers are advised to call the Los Angeles Festival, (800) 6-LA FEST, for specifics regarding hours and events, and availability of tickets. Tickets are available at (800) FEST-TIX.