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Reviews/Music; Swans' Gospel Messages

Published: November 16, 1988

The Swan Silvertones, one of gospel's most influential vocal groups, lasted from the 1940's to the 1970's. Until its final years, the group was built around the voice of the Rev. Claude Jeter, whose ascents into falsetto singing lifted the group's music toward otherworldly realms. For most of those years, his smooth lead vocals were balanced by a hard gospel shouter. Louis Johnson, the group's shouting co-lead singer from the mid-1950's on, rejoined Mr. Jeter and a harmony quartet, the Mellowtones, to re-create the group's hits as the New Swan Silvertones on Friday at the Triplex.

The group sang slow sustained hymns - the Swans' link to the pre-World War II jubilee gospel style -alongside more propulsive 1950's-style gospel songs, with the quartet's responses (and a steady, unobtrusive drumbeat) pushing the lead singers. In an old-fashioned sustained song, ''Careless Soul,'' Mr. Jeter revealed all that later singers (especially Al Green) have borrowed from him -the tense hesitations, the closed-mouth humming, the nasal inflections and the leaps into falsetto.

Mr. Jeter still has his high notes, penetrating yet sweet, but he deploys them more strategically now than he did in the Swans' heyday. Often, Mr. Johnson would start off a song, building it verse by verse, working up to a peak. Then Mr. Jeter would swoop in with a falsetto phrase or two to bring down the house. Both men work up a song's drama like the old hands they are, and it takes a singer as distinctive as Mr. Jeter to upstage Mr. Johnson. They spur each other to ever more flamboyant singing, and the devotional message benefits from their fervor.

Where the New Swan Silvertones sang a concert-style set, with a little preaching now and then from Mr. Jeter, two other groups on the bill sang the kind of set they would in church. The music starts slowly and builds, first to deliver the gospel message and then to get listeners to feel the presence of the Holy Ghost. The Heavenly Tones, a seven-man a capella group from Brooklyn, had three different leads - two baritone shouters and a bluesy tenor - over chordal harmonies and a doo-wopping bass singer, and their songs exhorted and luxuriated all at once.

The Golden Sons, also from Brooklyn, showed a gospel style reminiscent of 1960's soul and of such gospel singers as Shirley Caesar. Darryl McFadden, a 24-year-old singer, leads two backup singers, a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer in songs that chug along on two chords. Mr. McFadden can croon in his middle range, growl up above and dip down suddenly for low notes; he also acts out his songs.

Although he sometimes lacked the seeming spontaneity of more seasoned gospel performers, he knows how to work an audience; when he declared ''I'm getting ready to have church now'' and stepped out into the audience as he sang ''Hold On to God's Unchanging Hand,'' a woman stood up and started dancing and shaking, getting the spirit.