Culture & Community | Dixwell | Faith & Spirituality | Arts & Culture | Film & Video
A still from the music video. Jay Brantley of Virtual Lenz shot the short film.
Singer Lisa Bellamy walks down the aisle of Dixwell Avenue Congregational UCC, white light streaming in behind her. Her eyes swivel forward, fixed on something we can’t yet see at the front of the church. There’s a cascade of keys, and suddenly she is at the mic, face and palms turned to the sky. When the camera pulls back, she’s in a flowing purple gown. The silk glows in the light. A bevy of horns wait in the wings for their cue.
“There is healing/In this house,” she sings, her voice winding skyward. “Come on and lay your burdens down.”
The montage comes from “In This House,” a new gospel video from Bellamy meant to lift and heal spirits in a two-year period that has felt emotionally and mentally exhausting. With music direction from her husband, musician and educator William Fluker, and videography from Jay Brantley of Virtual Lenz, it is a New Haven production to its bones—and has her thinking about the power of music as a form of ministry.
It is inspired directly by Psalm 122, which begins with the sentence “Let us go into the house of the Lord,” and filmed at the historic Dixwell Avenue Congregational UCC, which celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2020. She released the video last Friday.
“I consider myself a psalmist storyteller,” she said in a phone call Monday morning. “My practice brings music and the heart of God together. Right now, what I see is pain, what I see is loss. As a psalmist—you bear the burdens of those around you. As a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, I think music is a way to connect with everyone. ”
While the video took only four or five hours to shoot, its story draws on decades of Bellamy's own experience. The vocalist grew up in a Baptist family in Arlington, Virginia. Members of her family often gathered around her grandmother's piano to sing and play. Her grandfather, the Rev. Clarence C.C. Gray, was a beloved preacher at the nearby Second Baptist Church. Her grandmother, a deaconess at the First Baptist Church of Merrifield in Virginia, “was the food bank.” Bellamy later clarified that she "served the community by managing the food bank regularly."
As a child, Bellamy found her voice in the church choir. When she started singing formally at nine, “I literally felt, as a child, that I wasn't standing on my own two feet.” It was as if she opened her mouth, and a force was working through her. It would take her years, including formal training in vocal music at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., to put her finger on what exactly she was experiencing. Along the way, she went on tour with the late Edwin Hawkins and Liz McComb.
Several years later, she wanted to bring that sense of storytelling to New Haven. While the area has been her home since 2010, she realized that she was seeing it differently during the pandemic, as Covid-19 strained the city and its residents in new ways. She saw grief all around her, sometimes so bottomless it seemed that it might swallow people up. She wrote what she knew: the healing, peace and deliverance that she found in the church.
“For those that may be down and distressed, it may be a reminder that they’re not alone,” she said. “At the end of the song I say: ‘I know you're tired. I know you're tired, and you've done all you can. And creator, you're gonna have to do it, because I don't have anything left.’”
Her husband, a master trumpeter who is the band director at Davis Street School, has jumped in as her collaborator. Like his wife, Fluker has been making music “all of my life”—he and Bellamy met on a 2008 tour with harpist Jeff Majors, and fell in love through their craft—and grew up in a family where music was one possible form of worship. When she came to him with the idea and the lyrics, he worked on the music.
“My mother always taught us to acknowledge the operation of God’s hands in all that we do,” Fluker said. “I tried to hold on to that. As a jazz musician, music is very spiritual to me.”
He also credited New Haven musician Tim Johnson, chief executive officer of Timstrel Music, for helping shepherd the process along. In the recording, Johnson plays keyboard, bass and strings for a full, orchestrated sound behind the vocals. Johnson is also a co-producer on the project with Bellamy and Fluker.
William Fluker and Dave Davis in a still from the music video. Jay Brantley of Virtual Lenz shot the short film.
“In This House” was released as a recording last September, but the idea of a video was one that Bellamy held onto. Last fall, she and Fluker reached out to Dr. Rev. Frederick J. Streets, the pastor at Dixwell Avenue Congregational UCC and a longtime supporter of their work. While both she and Fluker are members of the Hamden-based Grace Worship Assembly, she loved the idea of filming inside the Dixwell Avenue church, which has a history that winds from Temple and Crown Street in the 1820s to its current home at 217 Dixwell Ave.
For both musicians, the video is intended to be a spiritual balm during a pandemic that has exposed, many times over, a city and country in contrasts. When the video begins, viewers are suspended over the church for just a moment, looking down at the street below just as a bird might. Wispy clouds float through a smear of blue sky. Organ undulates under a fiery voice. It’s a way to call viewers in, making them wonder who it belongs to.
Brantley takes viewers inside, where Ronald Hammond is preaching at the pulpit. An elderly woman enters from the back, eyes wide, leaning on her cane and lifting her eyes as she walks. As Hammond’s vocals fade, Bellamy's take over. She’s at an old-school mic, her voice at home as it winds up to the ceiling and back into the quietest, hidden corners of the building. On camera, Brantley switches between scenes of her entrance, a vision in white taffeta with thick embroidery, and her solo at the front of the church.
The horns drop, and it’s suddenly a swinging, bluesy number with a heartbeat. Keys tremble and soar. Organ sings. Fluker and Dave Davis hold it down on trumpet and alto sax respectively. Behind Bellamy, a small choir appears, rocking in time with the music. She said that the verses, which trace the story of Lazarus and the exodus from Egypt, are written to let listeners know that miracles, even those of Biblical proportion, are still possible in the year 2022.
When she sings the words There’s deliverance! In this house!, a rolling tide at the edges of her voice, she means every word.
When she was still in the writing stages, Bellamy said she could see a whole storyboard appearing before her. It included the older woman, filled with awe and comfort as she entered the sunlit church. There was a mother with her two young children, seeking a place of reflection as the pandemic neared its two-year mark, as it will this March. There was, of course, the music coming to life. She lauded Brantley for making it happen, with different perspectives and cutaway shots of the church that make it feel visually full from start to finish.
Brantley, who started videography five years ago and now runs the company Virtual Lenz, said he was excited to work on the project. Born and raised on Winchester Avenue, he taught himself to do audio, and then photo and video work, through his own church. That’s also how he knows Bellamy, who he met through her time at Cornerstone Christian Center in Milford. So when he had the chance to jump on the project, he said yes. After growing up in the city, he was excited to pay homage to a place that had so much rich history in its walls.
“I wanted to get it right,” he said. “I wanted to get angles and really capture the essence of that historic building. I was really just trying to make the vision come to life.”
Ultimately, he did. Now that the video is out in the world, both Bellamy and Fluker said they are excited for people to experience it. Bellamy added that she is hopeful people will see it, and draw some solace from its message and sound.
“When you experience the responses from people, you learn that music actually serves to help people get through things,” Fluker said. “And it makes me want to continue to find ways to uplift people through music.
To learn more, visit Nspyre Music Group's website.