Fred Hammond at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill

As a boy in Detroit, Michigan, future gospel singer Fred Hammond played drums, bass and piano. After a stint in the U.S. Army, Hammond toured as bassist for the Winans from 1980 to 1982. Upon returning to Detroit, he co-founded the gospel group Commissioned in 1984 and simultaneously launched a solo career. For his solo work, he assembled a choir, Radical for Christ, which proved to be even more successful than Commissioned. In 2013, Hammond, Dave Hollister, Brian Courtney Wilson and Eric Roberson to create the vocal group United Tenors. Solo and with these various ensembles, Hammond has sold over 8 million albums, and won multiple Grammy, Dove, and Stellar awards as a performer, producer and writer. With these various enterprises, Hammond was among the architects of a new gospel music genre, Urban Praise & Worship. Hammond's most recent album is 2016's Worship Journal Live. He currently resides in Cedar Hill, Texas.

B.B. King Blues Club & Grill was a surrogate church at times during Hammond's concert, with multiple members of the audience chanting worship choruses to Hammond's lead vocals. Hammond's husky vocals were rich and rousing, convincingly professing the power of God, and rallying his public through his stomping gospel refrains. The set consisted of songs he popularized but also a few common contemporary worship songs, adapted to his singularly muscular delivery. Between songs, Hammond spoke at great length, and occasionally deviated into seemingly spontaneous interludes, such as a brief cover of the Temptations' "My Girl." When it came to his better-known songs, however, the sound was like thunder from heaven; Hammond was backed by two keyboardists and a rhythm section, but the sound was bigger than that, with prerecorded guitar fills and backing vocals augmenting for a fuller sound. In the end, Hammond's singing was remarkably stellar, such that perhaps his set would have been more impactful if he had minimized his chattiness and sang more.

Visit Fred Hammond at www.realfredhammond.com.