A version of this article first appeared in San Francisco Classical Voice and is reprinted by permission.
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 2024 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 just one of the choir’s many appearances.
For 54-year-old 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.”
Growing up in a secular academic family, Ellis found her own path, guided largely by music. Her late mother, Judith, was born into a Jewish family in the U.K. and graduated with a degree in sociology from the London School of Economics. She met Russ Ellis, an African American track star and jazz singer, while they were graduate students at UCLA. Judith spent nearly three decades working for the University of California’s Office of the President.
In high school, when her parents split up, Ellis and her mother found support within a tight-knit circle of Jewish and Israeli families in Berkeley “serious about High Holidays,” she recalled. “We still to this day celebrate holidays with the same group of people. At Shabbos, there’s something beautiful about those prayers being said by women all over the world.”
Ellis’ maternal grandparents moved to Israel in the early 1970s. She and her older brother, acclaimed saxophonist Dave Ellis, made their first Israel trip as kids “and we still have a lot of family there,” she said.
If she’s feeling the need for Jewish community, Ellis heads over to The Kitchen in San Francisco, where Rabbi Noa Kushner has forged ties with the Glide congregation.
“I love hearing her speak,” Ellis said. “It feels very similar to Glide. They set the room with music like we do. And Asher Levy is one of the best cantors I’ve ever heard, an incredible teacher and truly spiritual man. The last time I went to The Kitchen one of their singers didn’t show up and he just waved me into a chair. You realize this is in Hebrew, which I don’t read, the words are going 300 miles a minute and the text is ant-sized? I mostly kept up.”
Ellis didn’t grow up in the Black church, nor did she attend synagogue growing up. Yet she was drawn to the sense of community cultivated by singing worship music, and her identity as a Black Jew is mediated and embodied via musical expression.
“I’m not particularly religious, but I deeply believe in the power of music,” she said. The path hasn’t always been smooth, but she’s walked it belting out tunes that have sustained both diaspora communities through the hardest of times.
“It’s not always comfortable to claim both [identities], but I am verbal about the fact that I am Black and especially Jewish,” she said. “I am the sum total of the trials of both sets of people, and my connection is entirely in the tradition of music.”
While music was something of a birthright — her father was a longtime board member of Cazadero Performing Arts Family Camp — her talent wasn’t immediately evident to her family until a family visit to the camp one summer when she was about 12.
“We went up to visit and Zoe was performing and it was like, ‘Wow! Wait a minute!’” her father recalled. “We realized she had a voice. We weren’t paying attention to her musically, but she was paying attention to music.”
Ellis 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. 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 2000, 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 with his successor Vernon Bush following Turk’s death in 2018.
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 fatigue, and she rode to the rescue, filling in for him when he took a 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.
He was on another break when Williams died in April at age 94.
“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. We made it through the enormous transition, and it was pretty beautiful.”
It’s no wonder that the Rev. Marvin K. White, who has picked up the mantle from Williams, changed her interim status to permanent. Ellis credits her brother, Dave Ellis, for providing emotional support and musical advice. She also sings the praises of the Change Band’s music director, Joel Behrman.
“Vernon [Bush] 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,” Behrman said. “She’s got those personal skills for connecting and conveying her love for them while pursuing her goals. She’s also got a great sense of picking music. She understands that the choir would embrace those songs, and that the main part in the ministry is bringing in things that will lift and connect with the congregation.”
Ellis’ love of the gospel tradition is shaping her ambitions for the musical ministry. In addition to adding some repertoire, she’d like Glide to start a children’s choir and relaunch a care choir that brought music to hospitals, hospice and transitional housing. Ultimately, Ellis 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 three songs so any time there’s a moment that arises, we can respond: ‘Here’s the voice of the Bay.’”