Computer embellishes band's 'Pattern'

Most bands are lucky to have one first-rate lead singer. Occasionally, a band will have a pair of them. In rare cases such as Fleetwood Mac, the Band and Crosby, Stills and Nash, there will be three.

Sonia Dada has four -- Michael Scott, Paris Delane, Shawn Christopher and Sam Hogan. All the singers in this nine-piece, Chicago-based group, which blends elements of soul, gospel, rock and world music and has been together since 1990 -- are skillful enough to be a band's sole vocalist. But they share the load, singing solo or in various combinations.

"It's like having the widest palette you can imagine," said Dan Pritzker, 43, the band's guitarist and primary song writer. "It's like having every color in the rainbow for you to paint your painting."

Pritzker, who will perform with the band at the Mexicali Blues Cafe in Teaneck on Friday and B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in New York on Wednesday, says he usually determines who will sing lead. But a certain amount of jockeying for position is inevitable when it comes to sorting out the harmonies.

"I was with this guy in Egypt once, and he was married to a couple of different people at the same time, and he was saying, 'This isn't as good as you think, it's real hard to do,'" Pritzker said with a laugh. "Still, since we've been together, I remember only one huge blowup over, 'You're jumping all over my part,' 'These are my notes, you've got to sing below them' or 'You've got to sing above them' -- all that kind of stuff."

The band, which took its name from a Jordanian friend of Pritzker's wife ("I always thought it was a beautiful, mellifluous name," he said), released its sixth album, "Test Pattern," last month on the New York-based indie label, Razor & Tie.

Highlights include "Temple," a meditation on faith with gospel vocals and a funk-rock beat; "Gordon," a tender look at the joys and sorrows of a working-class couple's life, and "Old Bones," which adds some sweet country guitar and mandolin licks to the band's urban sound. Jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie guests on the track "Take Back."

As its title implies, the album is something of an experiment.

"I wrote these tunes, and then we'd record them and ship the multi-tracks to an old friend of mine, (LA based producer) Ron Schwartz, who stuck them in his computer," Pritzker said. "He had this program. He would take each track and slice it and dice it, about 150 ways to Sunday, and then send it back to us. We'd go, 'That's cool, that's interesting.' Then we would say, 'Let's do a guitar part like this' and 'Let's do a vocal over-dub that does this,' and then we'd ship it back to him, and he'd continue slicing and dicing.

"The best way I found to describe it is, when I was in high school, I had an art class where we had to do this thing called a re-orchestration. You had to take a painting or a detail of a famous painting, then go home and tear up a billion little pieces of paper -- magazines, crepe paper, that kind of thing -- and recreate the image in the painting."

The songs changed a lot in the process. Miraculously, the intricately detailed final tracks retain a live, organic feel. Pritzker said it isn't hard to play these multi-manipulated songs in concert.

"The thing the machines helped us do is create these arrangements. Once the arrangements are set ... I can cop the guitar part, for instance, even though it's my (original) part chopped 20 different ways. I can figure out what's going on. It's like being a 15-year-old again, and figuring out what's on your favorite records."