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Jamizon: Sweat Fest

Five of black radio's most popular singing acts came to Boston last Friday night as part of the "Jamizon" tour. But the Harborlights venue, sandwiched between skyscrapers and a boat marina, was a less than appropriate setting for acts like Keith Sweat, Brownstone, and Mark Morrison. The new breed of black-pop love-singers do not present themselves as downtowners. They're neighborhood types, suburban even, who affect homeboy and homegirl clothes, talk the language of backyard parties, and sing street-corner harmonies.

Jamizon accorded hardly a soupçon of time to SWV and local hopes the Shades. Brownstone, at least, was allowed to do seven songs, a full set, after which a long intermission left the audience in a foul mood. Finally Mark Morrison appeared, complete with dancers, MC, and band, to stomp his hit "Get High with Me." But no sooner was his way of getting high established than he shut the song down and ran off stage with his players, to a flood of boos. We were told he was terribly ill.

Which left it to Brownstone, who brought their own rowhouse and stairstep props with them, and Keith Sweat, whose direct appeals to the love-zone transcended the downtown surroundings to carry the show. Brownstone are three tall, athletic-figured ladies who wore everyday, homegirl outfits and sang ghetto-fab harmonies. No runway-model wanna-bes, they refused (unlike the Shades, who overplayed the slim-suit role) to supplement their singing with hand gestures and body movement. All three women solo'd and sang harmony. This was singing for singing's sake, an almost pre-video-age show. They made the melody suffer, like Philly-soul falsettoists from the early-'70s golden age of tender tension ballads. All that was missing from Brownstone's bitter-toned pleas and outcries was the sweetness of those classic ballads.

Keith Sweat, too, harked back to a golden age: the era of pure soul. At times his fierce, broken shriek called to mind Otis Redding going on his knees to croak and weep. In "Nobody," the high point of his set, he opened up his shirt and, with his arms spread wide, lifted his voice to the ceiling as, in duet with a tiny, kimono-clad love interest, he begged and prayed the melody of his song and confessed its lyrics almost to exhaustion.

But Sweat, who said "anything worth having is worth banging for" and called himself the "best banger of them all," also looked to a contemporary love rival, Babyface. The two men, it turns out, are polar opposites. Where Babyface makes love gently and poetically, persuading his beloved, Sweat thrusts his pelvis directly at his gal pal's lovebush. Babyface, in the part of his show that invites a female fan on stage to have a bit of love made to her, gives her a present; when Sweat's admirer took her seat on stage, he spread his legs and sat on her.

The bluntness of his act made it easy to observe that in Sweat's show the love moves depended completely upon the presence of a lover, whereas Babyface is able to make love to love itself as well as to a girlfriend. Sweat also had none of Babyface's sugar eye, marshmallow cheek, or openness. What did Sweat use to be before he took the microphone? The question surely haunts him. At one point he turned to the audience and said, "Thanks for making me Keith Sweat."

That audiences have done. And he has been willing.

-- Michael Freedberg