By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- Hallelujah, sing hallelujah. And they did, oh, my, they did.

The Hallelujah Train stopped at the Hayti Heritage Center Sunday night and for two hours Louisiana Pastor Brady Blade Sr. pranced and danced, growled and yowled in the stirring culmination of a Duke University-sponsored gospel project.

The performance was a live concert recording, and, backed by a 35-voice choir from Blade's Shreveport Zion Baptist Church, two of his musician sons and an illustrious cast of sidemen, the reverend helped shake up the old St. Joseph's AME church.

The idea for the live recording, conceived by Brian Blade, a renowned jazz drummer, was to both celebrate and replicate his father's half century of musical ministry at Zion Baptist. He rounded up some of his friends to form the band, including guitarist Daniel Lanois -- who's produced U2 and Bob Dylan -- and bassist Chris Thomas.

But the undoubted star was Blade's father.

The 70-year-old minister, commanding in a dark pin-striped suit and waving a black towel, had the packed audience in his hands from the moment he walked on stage. "Lord," he shouted out in a voice made a bit gravelly by age but still remarkably powerful, "keep my body strong. Lord, I know, I know."

The audience, which included several busloads of parishioners from Shreveport, met the gospel songs with rhythymic clapping and frequent shouts of "all right, all right."

"This is the music I grew up with," said Tyrone Jones, who lives in Durham. "This is the real thing. This is what music used to be like."

Alisha Stein, one of the audience members who arrived for the concert more than 45 minutes early, said she didn't know a lot about gospel.

"I'm not particularly religious," she said. "But what I've heard is just so powerful. That's why I wanted to come."

In the cozy theater, the sound -- with the chorus and 10 musicians jammed onto the small stage -- was almost overpowering. And the energy level never flagged.

"One of my bus drivers was really worried about me," Brady Sr. told the audience after a couple of numbers. "But what the bus driver doesn't know is this is a light Sunday for me. Just about every Sunday I preach three times -- at 8, 10 and 6 p.m."

The performance was, in fact, part preaching, part service and part revival. Blade, for instance, introduced a song called "The Lord's Been Good to Me" by advising the audience not to be in such hot pursuit of God's blessing.

"Sometimes the blessing is following you," he said. "Slow down and let it catch up to you."

The recording of the album -- on both Saturday and Sunday nights -- was part of a project that also included a Sunday worship service and a residency with classroom visits and conversations at both Duke and N.C. Central universities today and Tuesday.

The project was called The Hallelujah Train because that was the name of the television show that the Rev. Blade hosted for "many years," he said, down in Shreveport.

"And can you believe it," Blade added, "they don't have a single ... tape of all those shows? That's why Brian wanted to do this legacy concert. We've got to put some of this foolishness on tape."