In preparation for my trip to the United States of America,  and because this is a rare event, last night I attended a concert by the Harlem Gospel Choir at Sala Kongresowa, right here in downtown Warsaw, Poland.  The music was spectacular and uplifting, even for the highest of spirits.

The crowd was a little stiff in the beginning, but loosened up considerably toward the end.  With such great music and great singing, and the Harlem Gospel Choir asking everyone to get up, wave hands, do a little dance, and what-have-you, it’s hard not to have a good time.  They sang a Christmas medley and some other great tunes like “I believe I can fly,” “O When the Saints,” “O Happy Day,” “Celebration,” “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,”and a very powerful song called, “In the Ghetto.”  When they sang “In the Ghetto,” a standard for Elvis on his comeback tour, I turned to my wife and said, “do they mean the Warsaw Ghetto?”

Sala Kongresowa is where the Communist Party held their meetings.  It holds about 1500, so only the top members were admitted to the CP meetings.  Now, Sala Kongreswoa holds concerts like these and other events.  The red chairs are faded and threadbare in places and the paint needs more paint.  If the HGC understood the significance of singing gospel in such an historical setting, they didn’t mention it or show it.  To them, it was just another hall to praise the Lord and get people happy, part of their post-communist swing through Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.  This was their last stop before Christmas.

What was it like for an American to see the HGC in Poland?  Strange, as you can imagine.  When they said, “Has anyone been to Harlem?” my wife and I were one of the few to raise our hands.  The audience was 98% white and considering the tickets weren’t cheap (about 100 zl per ticket), the audience was mostly middle aged, though there were about 25% young folk.  The HGC didn’t try to speak Polish much, and they talked a lot, so for me, I felt like I was seeing them in America.  When looking around, and seeing a sea of Polish faces and the socialist-era architecture, I felt the strangeness of it.  I don’t know how much the audience understood (probably most of it, considering that people who come to see the HGC in Poland probably understand english fairly well), but they knew the songs and sang along.  I did, too. 

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