Canter Bridge

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This private-label collection of Messianic Jewish worship services highlights the tenor voice of the author and a moving collection of biblical texts that are sung in both Hebrew and English.

The spare arrangements mean that one hears a lot of McConnell, arguably the album’s strength andweakness. His voice is fluid and not unpleasant, but not blessed with immense range. If you like it, you get a lot of it. If you don’t, ditto.

As has been a near constant with Jewish and Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible since Qumran and that community’s ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, the Psalms, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah figure prominently. The lyric potential of those biblical books is well served by McConnell’s work, a capacity nowhere more in evidence than in McConnell’s piano-and-voice rendering of the famous Isaiah declaration ‘Nachamu, nachamu, ammiy’ (‘Comfort, comfort, my people!).

This 1996 collection led to better things. As a less than overwhelming beginning, it insinuated that better things were on the way. Indeed they were.