As an artist and human being, Zoe Ellis contains multitudes, so it’s not surprising that she was both a superlatively qualified and utterly unlikely choice to become Glide Memorial Church’s next director of music ministries, a role she assumed in November.
The Berkeley vocalist brings a wealth of experience and training to a position that puts her at the heart of the Bay Area’s civic culture, running an all-volunteer choir that brings uplift, joy, and succor to every kind of occasion, from athletic events and community functions to memorials and, of course, Glide’s famously celebratory Sunday morning services. With the death in April of the congregation’s iconic guiding spirit, Rev. Cecil Williams, the music ministry is more than ever the instrument that manifests Glide’s welcoming ethic around the region.
“We get calls from City Hall to sing in the rotunda,” Ellis said, listing some of the choir’s recent appearances. R&B vocalist Mike Marshall, a longtime Glide artist, “took 12 of us to sing at the reopening of the Transamerica Pyramid [in September]. We were hired to surprise this woman’s husband at his birthday party last week. And today, we had two requests, for SantaCon and an event at Glide.”
For Ellis, who describes herself as “a nice Jewish kid,” leading a gospel choir wasn’t so much embracing a familial legacy as following her muse. “I didn’t grow up in the church,” she said. “I chose to learn this tradition, and Glide might be the only place where a Jewish girl can run the gospel choir.”
While she may not have grown up in the Black church, Ellis has long been drawn to the particular sense of community cultivated by singing worship music. She started performing with the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir in her late teens and counts the ensemble’s founding artistic director, Terrance Kelly, as one of her primary mentors. In the secular world, she’s thrived in the funkiest settings, starting with the Mo’Fessionals in the early 1990s, belting out uproarious R&B and soul as a counterpoint to fellow group member Chris Burger’s freestyle rapping.
She and Caitlin Cornwell, another Mo’Fessionals vocalist, earned international attention as the Braids when their hip-hop-inflected version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was featured on the hit soundtrack of the 1996 film High School High. Ellis seems drawn to creatively charged ensemble settings, like Keith Terry’s Slammin All-Body Band, Linda Tillery’s field-hollers-to-rap Cultural Heritage Choir, and the improvisation-based a cappella ensemble SoVoSó. Ellis has kept a lower performance profile in recent years, but she’s always working on something musical, writing songs and recording studio tracks with bassist Darryl Anders’s soul combo AgapéSoul, for example.
She started singing with Glide around the turn of the century, when her future husband wanted to join a choir, and she kept performing with the group after they divorced. Even after she left the church ensemble in 2004, she stayed in touch with the choir’s then-director, John Turk. And when her SoVoSó bandmate Vernon Bush took over at Glide following Turk’s death in 2018, Ellis kept close tabs on his work.
Bush sought to bring precision and order to the ensemble, with individual parts written out so that the vocalists could learn new material more quickly. During Sunday services, the group often had to turn on a dime in response to a segue or tangent from Williams, “and I really wanted to get it so it worked like clockwork, including the band,” Bush said. “You never knew what you were going to get on a Sunday. That’s how Cecil rolled, and that’s where a lot of the jazz chops came in handy. It’s improvisation, being present in the moment, and going with whatever happens.”
Bush kept the choir together through the first years of the pandemic, a herculean effort that left him worn thin. Ellis saw her friend’s physical and spiritual fatigue and rode to the rescue, filling in for him when he took a four-month sabbatical. The experience gave her a chance to develop trust with the ensemble, and after he returned, she stayed on as assistant choir director and manager of the music department.
Bush was on another break when Williams died this year at the age of 94, “and I found myself in the middle of this really intense time,” Ellis said. “Vernon’s first day back was Cecil’s funeral, where the 80-member Legacy Choir performed. Last [month] was our big Holiday Jam at the Masonic, and the ensemble and the [Glide] Change Band were incredible. I’m really proud of how that all went. We made it through the enormous transition, and it was pretty beautiful.”
Ellis credits her older brother Dave, a saxophonist, for being her rock, providing emotional support and musical advice. She also sings the praises of the Change Band’s music director, trumpeter and trombonist Joel Behrman, whose two-decade tenure has provided an essential link from the Turk era through the present. An accomplished jazz musician who can often be found on Bay Area bandstands, Behrman has been heartened by the Glide music ministry’s recovery as the choir has grown back to about 30 members after sinking to around a dozen.
“The pandemic really decimated the choir and music program in general,” Behrman said. “Vernon kept it afloat at a time when it was in real jeopardy, and when Zoe came on to assist, she did an amazing job developing trust. She’s got those personal skills for connecting and conveying her love for [the singers] while pursuing her goals. She’s also got a great sense of picking music. She understands that the choir would embrace [certain] songs and that the main part of the ministry is bringing in things that will lift and connect with the congregation.”
Growing up in a distinguished academic family, Ellis found her own path. Her late mother, Judith, was born into a Jewish family in the U.K. and graduated with a bachelor’s in sociology from the London School of Economics. She met Russ Ellis, an African American track star and jazz singer, while they were both graduate students at UCLA, and she spent nearly three decades working on issues affecting student life and campus experience for the University of California's Office of the President.
A professor emeritus of architecture at UC Berkeley, Russ Ellis said that Dave, his eldest child, seemed to be the member of the family with the musical touch. But one summer when she was about 12, Zoe tagged along with him to summer music camp at Cazadero, “and we went up to visit, and Zoe was performing, and it was like, ‘Wow! Wait a minute!’ So there was a moment when we realized she had a voice. We weren’t paying attention to her musically, but she was paying attention to music.”
Zoe Ellis’s love of the gospel tradition is shaping her ambitions for the music ministry. The choir has a huge book of original material by Turk and songs she and Bush have brought in, but Ellis wants to make sure that “if you walked into any Black church, you could look around and not be completely lost. There are songs you have to know, like ‘Blessed Assurance,’ ‘I Won’t Complain,’ and ‘How Great Thou Art.’”
Her ambitious goals for the music ministry’s repertoire are just a piece of her plan. She’d like Glide to start a children’s choir and relaunch a care choir, bringing music to hospitals, hospice, and transitional housing. Ultimately, she wants to join forces with other gospel choirs in the region so that a contingent is always on call to answer the spiritual and musical needs of the community — “kind of a rapid-response social justice choir,” she said. “I want to gather those choir directors and get together to learn these songs so any time there’s a moment that arises, we can respond. Here’s the voice of the Bay.”