Newsday (Dec. 17th 2007)
Can voters tell the gospel truth? Viewers to judge choirs picked by celebrities on NBC
[edited version]
A great choir can make your soul feel as if it's reaching up to heaven. A bad one can make you wish life came with volume control.
NBC's "Clash of the Choirs," airing tonight through Thursday at 8 on Ch. 4, could leave viewers feeling a little of each. This contest pits five choirs against one another, the gimmick being that each is under the tutelage of a celebrity who has chosen the members from his hometown.
The celebrity, however, is not singing with the choir.
Some 2,000 people auditioned in five cities, and 100 will make their way to New York for the performances. Online voters will pick a winner.
NBC sought an interesting mix of genres. The legendary Patti LaBelle started in a church choir in her native Philadelphia, and she says she agreed to do this show the moment she was asked - then had second thoughts. "I knew it would involve telling people they couldn't," LaBelle says. "The hardest thing for me is to reject someone."
Though her musical director had winnowed down the applicants, LaBelle admits some of the singers were less than talented. "Some of them were pitiful," she says. "I literally laughed out loud. I could not hold back my laughter. I had to tell them, 'Please excuse me, but you are kind of funny.'" Still, she managed to select six tenors, seven sopranos and seven altos.
She was in far better shape than Blake Shelton, the country singer from Oklahoma City, who was excited about the contest but had yet to listen to anyone. Also, he had never sung in a choir. "I don't know -- about putting together a choir," Shelton says. "Maybe that's why they picked me.
"I am just stepping into the dark here," he says. "Me and my choir, we'll learn as we go along, and we'll have fun together. . .. Patti LaBelle and Michael Bolton are top vocalists. They are just out of this world. I will have to remind my choir to spit out their dips [smokeless tobacco] before they start singing."