Take 6 Brings Its Unique Sound to Overture’s Capitol Theater on April 25: Still Refreshing and Unique after 45 Years
by Jonathan Gramling
For most of the 20th Century and beyond, fresh and unique forms of music have arisen out of the Black community, from gospel and spirituals to jazz to blues to R&B to rap and hip hop. These sounds and beats were born in the fields when Africans who were enslaved worked under inhumane conditions in southern cotton fields.
And their cry for freedom and expression have reverberated within the music industry in each successive wave of musical genres, new and fresh musical approaches would take the industry by storm.
And so it was as much a fulfillment of those ancient voices as it was personal design that suddenly propelled Take 6, an a cappella men’s group that blends spirituals with jazz and inspirational lyrics, to the national stage in 1980 and would go on to win 10 Grammys, 10 Dove, 2 NAACP Image and a Soul Train awards.
“We all performed in church as children,” said Claude McKnightr, the founder of Take 6. “Specifically I did. My family is very musical and so we grew up in the church. And my grandfather was the choir director in Buffalo, NY. So we all kind of matriculated through that choir as we were growing up.”
Above: Take 6 members who will appear at the Capitol Theater
Left: Take 6 founder Clyde McKnight
McKnight went to Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. It was a Seventh-Day Adventist college that was a musical college.
“I was intentional about having a group,” McKnight said. “I literally found three other freshmen guys at the time within a week or two of being at school who could sing. And so we just kind of stood around barbershop style as a quartet until we happened upon a gentleman as we were rehearsing in a bathroom. Mark Kibble whom I had known many years before started arranging for the group. That’s when we started taking on our jazz quality and we added one more member. And as they say, the rest was history.”
Take 6’s big break came at a Nashville showcase that looked like it had been a dud.
“We probably had five people there,” McKnight said. “And unbeknownst to is, J. Ed Norman who was the vice-president of the country music division of Warner Brothers Records in Nashville came to that showcase uninvited and listened to us. And afterwards, he said that he loved the music. He didn’t know what he would do with it. But he wanted to sign us to a deal. And that was our breakthrough. He signed us to a 20-day ringer contract. We were amazed in the sense that he wasn’t invited. We had no idea who this guy was. We were a little disappointed that there were so few people at the showcase. And literally, afterwards, he came up to us. It was the country music division. We were like, ‘What is happening here?’ Everything happened in ways that I suppose it was supposed to happen that way. But at the time, we had no clue on what was going on.
Very quickly their debut album Take 6 would go on to win Grammy and Dove awards.
“It was surreal when we won our first Grammy Award,” McKnight recalled. “We were invited to the Grammys to perform on the awards show, which is the real Grammy onto itself. And to be nominated on our first album for three of them and to win two was an amazing experience for us. The Grammys are even more than glitzy. It’s a live event and you have very little time to prepare for it. And whatever you do has to be done in that moment. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of glitz. Everyone was there. We had Stevie Wonder in the front row jumping up. It was an amazing experience. We were young. We were still in college at the time.”
And as the newest sound, everyone wanted to be a part of it.
“Very early on in our career, we, for whatever reason, I think it was one of those things where everyone in the industry knew who we were,” McKnight said. “And because we were considered at that time, a pretty new sound — it was something very different from everything else that was on — we had the opportunity to record with people who not only were jazz artists or gospel artists, but everybody between pop artists and Brazilian artists. They were from all over the map. It was everyone from Kenny Rodgers to Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder to k.d. Lang to Johnny Mathis. There were a lot of people.”
What was beautiful about it was the national artists wanted to come into their musical world and not vica versa.
“It wasn’t hard because they wanted what it was that we were bringing,” McKnight observed. “So they were essentially asking us to do whatever it was that we were doing and they fit into that. We were singing the music that we had always sung. And they wanted that as a part of what they were doing.
Remarkably in spite of their fame and success, the group has remained stable in its membership over the years.
“I want to say that five of us now have been together for 35 years,” McKnight said. “Joey Kibble replaced Mervin Warren in 1990. That’s 36 years for Joey. And then Khristian Dentley replaced Cedric Dent. They were sharing duties 21 years. Khristian has been with us that long.”
And in all of these years, their sound has remained fresh. They aren’t trying to be who they were 35 years ago. They are trying to find out who they are now.
“It’s been easier to keep the music fresh than you would think,” McKnight said. “In this group, everyone is really, really creative. And so we are always pushing each other. There is no shortage of what you can do as far as creativity and music are concerned. So we are always looking for the next thing, something that will really whet our appetite. It’s always been something that has been easy for us to just continue moving forward. Again, moving forward in whatever direction is feeling right at the time.”
And although they have evolved over time, they have remained true to themselves.
“I think for us, it’s been easy to be a sense of stability in an ever changing world because we’ve pretty much stuck to trying to do things that really, really make sense for us creatively,” McKnight said. “Instead of changing trends or trying to figure out what the audience wants, we try to do things that really speak to us. And that has really worked for us.”
When people come to hear them in Overture’s Capitol Theater, it will be like a musical trip through time.
“People should expect to hear songs from everything that we’ve recorded, from the very first album to the one we are working on now which is called Rhapsody,” McKnight said. “We’re just in the finishing touches of it. We’ll do some songs from that as well. The new album is a collection of jazz standards. It’s really, really special for us. And it was a really hard album to do to do justice not only to these songs, but to also find fresh ways of interpreting them so that we could bring them into this new century.”
When Take 6 performs, they look at it as a participatory event.
“When we come to do our show, we’re going to give you things that you can’t get on record,” McKnight emphasized. “You’ve got to be there to experience it in the flesh. We’re going to ask you to sing. We’re going to ask you to get up and join us. And we are all just going to have a good time together.”
When you come to listen Claude McKnight on April 25th at Overture, you will hear something old and something new. But all of it will be as fresh as the day it was born in the creativity of Take 6.
