Surprise Finalist in Choir Fest Testifies to L.A. Cultural Fusion

On a recent chilly evening inside a North Hollywood rehearsal studio, an unlikely group of former gangbangers, high school misfits and Satan worshipers was tearing the house down.

They were bouncing and swaying, these kids from the streets of suburban Los Angeles. Their bodies were animated, and they were hyped--not by drugs or mischief, but by music. And not just any music.

For these are the Soldiers on Soul Patrol, a gospel choir made up mostly of Latino youngsters that, improbable though it seems, has reached the finals tonight of the 16th Annual McDonald’s Gospelfest at the Shrine Auditorium, an event that each year searches out the best amateur gospel talent in Southern California.

The success of the Soldiers in a musical idiom steeped in the traditions of the black church has left many surprised. Lindsay Hughes, the chairman and co-founder of Gospelfest, first saw the group during one of the early-round competitions.

“I’m looking at them, and I don’t know what they’re going to do,” says Hughes, who recalls how they first sang in Spanish that day, switched to English and really “went to church. I sat up and said, ‘I don’t believe they’re this good.’ ”

But the very existence of this cheerfully devout group says much about the fusing of cultures, religions and identities that is quintessentially Los Angeles. Soldiers on Soul Patrol is the first majority Latino group to be represented at Gospelfest, Hughes says.

Also among the nine finalists that will compete is One

Voice, a white Victorville choir. Most of the other choirs are from black churches.

Randy Quesada, the charismatic 19-year-old who founded Soldiers on Soul Patrol a year and a half ago, says gospel music was foreign to most of the members. But its rhythms and responsive chants became a natural expression for Latino kids steeped in popular music and eager to embrace newfound evangelical beliefs.

The group’s fast-paced, almost hip-hop sensibility represents a new generation of Christian ministry geared to kids reared on television, rap and the Internet.

For Quesada, the path to the finals seems a little unreal. The group went through a crowded preliminary round and a semifinal competition held in September at which it was chosen as one of two youth choirs that will compete.

“We just laugh, ‘cause there’s no way we ever imagined being here,” he says.

Many of the group’s 95 members--who are based at El Monte’s Santa Anita Apostolic Church--say they come from troubled backgrounds of broken homes, afflicted by alcoholic parents, drug abuse and aimlessness. They now spend their free time not at shopping malls or movies but out on street corners, preaching the gospel on megaphones to anyone who’ll listen.

None of the members claim much in the way of musical training. During a recent rehearsal, Quesada resembles a manic traffic cop. Afterward, he motions a few of them over for some short solos.

“Sing ‘Sweet Anointing,’ ” he commands best friend Rudy Lemus, a 19-year-old from Tujunga who warbles a bit before going off key.

But when they put their voices together “something happens,” says Quesada, who is hoarse from long days of rehearsing. “They’ve got a reason to shout, to get up and make complete fools of themselves.”

What the Soldiers lack in musicianship they make up in enthusiasm. Perhaps partly because these are mostly young people who did not grow up in the church, they bring with them the zeal of the newly converted.

Much of that conviction is attributed to Quesada, who is like a shepherd to this flock of not-quite-innocent lambs. He was a jock in junior high who did not smoke or drink, but seethed with an anger borne of a troubled relationship with his father, he says.

At 14, he would stay out all night at parties, get into fights and shoplift from stores in his Palmdale neighborhood. He saw psychiatrists and spent time in a youth detention camp after putting a gun to his father’s head and threatening to kill him. No one was injured, and his father and he are reconciled.

Quesada says he started to change after he began attending an Apostolic church with his mother. The family moved to Sylmar, and he transferred to Tujunga’s Verdugo Hills High School, where he stood on lunch tables and preached to fellow students.

Some of the classmates who mocked his beliefs became converts, though. Twenty-year-old Jesse Quintana was on his way to get a tattoo when a friend persuaded him to attend a church where Quesada was preaching.

Nearly a year later, Quintana talks about how close he had come to self-destructing. He also describes a problem-plagued family in which he became a masochist who needed to mutilate himself to feel emotion.

Since then, though, there has been a happy transformation.

“We went from the biggest dysfunctional family to the Brady Bunch,” Quintana says, smiling. His parents are helping him pay his rent and attend Los Angeles Trade Technical College, where he is studying to be an English teacher.

For 18-year-old Sharlotte Nahas, the conversion from a black mascara-wearing Goth devotee who had planned suicide to a sunny, well-scrubbed gospel chorister has been bittersweet. She was raised in a traditional Lebanese home, and her Catholic parents have not accepted her new denomination.

“I went from being an alcoholic to an Apostolic,” Nahas says with a laugh.

The Soldiers are among the vanguard of a new generation of musically inspired Christian youth, says Jason Aguilar, a 25-year-old Orange County founder of the West Coast Christian Tabernacle in Santa Ana. He encouraged the Soldiers to develop their own style and write their own music even if those are not necessarily appreciated by church elders.

“It’s more the method that people are not always happy about, like when the music gets going and the kids start dancing,” he says. “It’s a whole different game today, and you are not going to reach young people like you did before. Banjos and harmonicas are not going to do it.”

The 16th Annual McDonald’s Gospelfest, presented by Disneyland Park, will be held from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. at the Shrine Auditorium. Proceeds will benefit the Pride and Leadership for African American Youth Scholarship Program.