Holiday Greetings From A Kansan Who Can Capture ‘The Cry Of A Nation’ And Spread Joy To The World

By C.J. Janovy, the Kansas Reflector

December 21, 2020

Isaac Cates was on a Christmas tour around Switzerland in 2014 and needed some music to sell.

He’d come a long way from Bethany Hospital, the since-demolished hospital in Kansas City, Kansas, where he seems to have been born with greatness.

Cates was 4 years old when his mother enrolled him in piano lessons, which he was not happy about.

“I was a pretty typical little boy,” he said, which isn’t exactly true.

“I could play, sing, draw, paint — I was a Renaissance kid. Some of the things I created went to state in competition,” he said. “I could do a lot of anything but didn’t want to. I wanted to be with my friends and play.”

What he played, though, was classical piano and church music at the Metropolitan Baptist Temple. He could read music and play by ear, which is rare.

“Usually, musicians from the Black church either play by ear, or if you study classical they only play by sheet music,” he explained. “I was sort of a weird kid in that I could always do both almost even-handedly.”

He wrote his first song at 14, began singing with school choirs and learned other styles of music — namely jazz — and played at other churches: the United Methodists, the 7th Day Adventists, even some Lutherans. He graduated from Washington High School in 2003 and went on to the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music, where he met a fellow student and songwriter named Anthony Harvey.

“He was like a brother to me,” Cates said. “At the Conservatory there weren’t many Black students — there still aren’t. He was like, ‘We should start a group.’ It was his vision of asking different singers from all around Kansas City who we knew.”

That became Ordained, which released its first album in 2006. Harvey eventually left for other musical pursuits, but Cates kept it going. Which brought him to Switzerland around this time in 2014.

“Carol of the Bells” is so familiar that it might be hard, at first, to hear Cates’ imprint on the recording they made for a Christmas EP so they could have something to sell on the tour. He set out to honor the piece, working carefully with the score to re-harmonize some parts.

He also added piano accompaniment to a piece that’s typically done a capella or only with bells.

Then, he said, “I composed a bunch of extra material at the end of the piece, which is all a capella. It’s reminiscent of Moses Hogan, a famous composer of Negro spirituals.”

Cates wanted the singers to “literally become the bells,” he said.

“I was almost worried when I first put it out,” Cates said. “I thought people might be angry.”

Which is not possible.

“Little did I know that with that EP with some of those arrangements, specifically the ‘Carol of the Bells,’ would go all around the world,” Cates said. “My rendition of that has probably 2 million views between all the different platforms.”

Since then, he’s toured Europe and Australia, teaching and singing. Recently, he signed on to be a worship leader at the Church of the Resurrection.

It was another song by Cates that caught my attention in 2017 and has only become more relevant. Over the summer, Cates updated the video for “Hold On” with new images from 2020.

“You could just feel the presence of God in there, but also the pain,” Cates said of the day they recorded the music, in the early days of the Trump administration. “I just wanted to capture what I felt like were the cries of the unheard, the cry of a nation.”

I asked Cates about the dilemma of “holding on” even when things keep getting worse instead of better.

“Therein lies the major question,” he said.

“It is my faith that is paramount to me holding on,” he said, summarizing a passage in Jeremiah (I later looked it up, it’s 29:11, where God says: “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”)

While things might have grown worse for the country over the last few years, Cates said, “it hasn’t been an unrelenting worse. I find the victories and joys in little stuff. People do get new jobs, have children, matriculate or start businesses, meet personal goals they set.”

And he takes lessons from history.

“As a Black man, I can’t complain because I’m not alive during slavery,” he said. “Although the needle is moving slowly, and progress might not happen in the expanse of individual lifetimes, it happens. We are recipients today of things that got better from decades ago.”

I’m an unchurched nonbeliever, but even I can see that Isaac Cates is a gift from Kansas to the world. Enjoy.

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