Wow! What a first night. When Minister Earl Bynum told me a few of the things to expect, my head really didn’t wrap completely around it. Tonight, the sweet reality set in.
Our tour manager – “Mad Max,” met us at the airport this morning and flew over to Reggio Calabria with us. “John” met us at the hotel when it was time to head to the venue. “Mad Max” and “John” drove us there in the van – which “John” drove down from Rome. When we arrived at the venue we noticed the large poster in the window with our group photo announcing our performance. We were greeted with great hospitality – like we were big stars. The audio crew was getting the sound system together. They worked hard on it until they got it right. While they were getting it together, we had dinner. La Sosta Club is a Jazz club in Villa San Giovanni with a fantastic menu. We had some amazing pasta and seafood. After we ate our fill, we did our sound check, got dressed, and sat in amazement as the crowd grew and grew until is was standing room only!
“Mad Max” gave us a fantastic introduction. The crowd was cheering enthusiastically – as if they already knew that they were about to hear something wonderful. It made me wonder… I knew they didn’t have a clue who I was or what I sounded like. But… praise God for a fun crowd.
So we went into our first song… “Dance In My Feet.” I thought it would be a great starting song because it’s easy to manipulate that song and do fun things with the crowd – especially getting them to clap with us and sing the “yeah yeah” with us in the vamp. Knowing that it wasn’t an English speaking crowd, I wanted to capitalize on chants and cheers throughout the set as much as possible. Well, the first song went over extremely well and from that moment on, we had the crowd.
It was interesting watching them respond to the way we fluctuated the mood with the song order. I wanted to move from upbeat to contemplative back to upbeat throughout the set over and over again. This way I knew that the crowd wouldn’t get bored nor lost. It seemed to work. We watched them listen intently to “Holy Is The Lord” getting quite interested when we starting singing it in Italian. We watched them rock out to “We’ve Come This Far By Faith.” I’ll tell you more about the songs as we go along this journey.
There were a couple of musicians sitting in the front who reminded me of the musicians in America. Whenever we did an unexpected harmonic change or I used an unpredicted chord change, they started banging on the table or hollering, gesturing the universal “did you hear that?!”
It was a night where we really couldn’t do sermonizing, preaching, giving a testimony or anything like that. If I’d tried any of those methods, it would have been futility. They people in the audience wouldn’t have understood anything I was saying anyway. We knew we had to get up and sing knowing that there was a powerful message in the music and an anointing on us. We had to allow the Jesus in us to simply shine through as we sang His praises. And, you know what… that’s exactly what happened.
Since it’s 3:00 AM as I’m writing this (9:00 PM on the east coast of the US), suffice it to say, the first night was fantastic! We were well received. We were called back on stage for an unexpected encore. Fortunately, we had something we could pull out! We sold CDs. We all signed lots of autographs. It was a blast!!
Tomorrow morning, we drive to Potenza where we will be singing at Church S. Anna. Don’t forget to pray for us.
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