Randomly scrolling through YouTube concerts from the African diaspora can take you anywhere. In this case, it led this writer to Festival of Praise Manchester 2024, an annual faith-based music gathering that brings worshippers, musicians and choirs together for a night of contemporary worship music.

There are several guest performers across the programme, but one of the most interesting moments comes from the Festival of Praise Mass Choir. About 50 singers fill the stage, working through a medley of familiar worship songs with the kind of force that makes the contribution of the backing vocalists difficult to ignore.

Backing vocals are among the most integral parts of live music, even when they are rarely treated that way. They strengthen melodies, carry harmonies, answer lead vocals and give choruses greater weight. In a mass choir, every singer has to understand where their voice sits within the arrangement. The whole thing depends on everyone listening closely enough to move together.

That sense of unity runs through the Festival of Praise performance.

Led by a main vocalist, the choir follows a tightly coordinated call-and-response structure. Voices move in and out of the lead performance without losing the central melody. Refrains are extended for emphasis, while repeated chants gradually increase in intensity.

The size of the choir gives every return more weight, but the performance remains organised enough for individual voices to emerge when the arrangement needs them.

Mojoyinoluwa Elizabeth Alabi is one of the voices that stands out within that structure.

The Lagos-born vocalist, now based in Manchester, began her professional music journey around 2022 and has worked as a backing singer across platforms including MMPraise, Festival of Praise Manchester and Festival of Life.

During this performance, however, her role stretches beyond simply reinforcing the choir. She operates at times as a secondary vocal anchor, responding to the lead singer and introducing short improvisations that help propel the ensemble forward.

That role becomes especially clear during the opening section of the medley.

As the choir settles into the refrain, “He’s my hope and firm foundation/He’ll never let me down,” the arrangement leans heavily on repetition.

The line returns several times, but the choir avoids making every repetition feel identical. Harmonic emphasis shifts. Vocal pressure rises and falls. Some phrases are stretched, while others arrive with sharper accents.

Alabi helps sustain those changes.

Her voice enters between the lead vocalist and the wider choir, sometimes carrying melismatic phrases and, at other moments, introducing brief chants that are absorbed into the larger ensemble.

These interventions give the choir another point of direction without competing unnecessarily with the lead.

The effect is particularly interesting because the medley relies heavily on antiphonal singing. A line is introduced. Another voice responds. The choir answers. The process continues until familiar worship lyrics begin to feel larger than their original recordings.

That happens again as the ensemble moves into “I put my faith in Jesus/My anchor to the ground.”

Here, the choir stretches the refrain and allows each cycle to gather more emotional weight. The intensity comes not simply from increased volume but from the changing delivery. Chants become more dynamic, harmonies thicken and individual voices begin finding spaces within the arrangement.

The choir then moves through another familiar passage: “There’s no shadow you won’t light up/Mountain you won’t climb up coming after me.”

The transition introduces greater urgency. Percussion becomes heavier, and the voices begin pushing harder against the instrumental foundation.

By the time the medley reaches “In my Father’s house there’s a place for me/I’m a child of God, yes I am,” the choir is already operating at considerable intensity.

The singers remain tightly connected, but the arrangement begins demanding even greater tonal control. With so many voices operating simultaneously, maintaining clarity becomes more difficult.

This is where the backing vocalists begin doing some of their most important work.

Alabi appears to understand when to step into the arrangement and when to pull away. Her improvisations rarely feel detached from what the choir is doing. Instead, she listens for spaces where another vocal line can increase the tension or reinforce the progression without disrupting the central melody.

When the lead vocalist completes a phrase, Alabi can respond almost immediately, creating another layer for the wider ensemble to follow.

The performance becomes even more intense towards the final section.

“The Son of God is lifted high/Oh wonderful and glorious,” the choir sings, repeatedly attacking the refrain and lifting the energy with each return.

Some moments verge on overwhelming because of the density of voices and percussion, but that excess also becomes part of the experience. This is worship performed at full intensity, with the choir constantly searching for another level.

Then the performance changes character.

A darker chord progression enters and briefly alters the atmosphere. The harmony takes on an almost cinematic quality, introducing tension before the voices begin asserting themselves again.

Then comes the chanting.

“The first, the last, alive forevermore.”

“The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.”

“The Alpha, Omega, beginning and the end.”

By this point, the choir has moved into something approaching a war chant. Percussion pounds beneath the voices while the singers repeat the declarations with increasing intensity.

Alabi’s interjections become more prominent here, helping to push the chant forward as the larger ensemble responds.

The performance is no longer relying primarily on melody. Rhythm becomes equally important. Words are repeated until they begin functioning almost like percussion, with each declaration landing as another rhythmic accent within the arrangement.

This is also where the value of an effective backing vocalist becomes easiest to hear.

The role depends on sensitivity to everything happening around the singer. It requires knowing not simply what to sing, but when to sing it, how forcefully to deliver it and when silence serves the arrangement better.

That sensitivity is central to good choir performance.

When several dozen people are singing simultaneously, volume alone cannot carry the music. Vocal parts have to be placed carefully. Soprano, alto, tenor and other lines require enough distinction for their textures to remain audible within the collective sound.

The ensemble also benefits from singers who can recognise when an arrangement needs another push. Throughout this performance, Alabi provides that kind of vocal anchoring.

Her contribution also points towards the wider possibilities of the mass choir as a live-performance format.

Large vocal ensembles do not have to remain confined to conventional church presentations. There is room for choirs to reinterpret classics across faith-based and even secular music, using the human voice to create expansive arrangements without making them unnecessarily complicated.

The Festival of Praise Mass Choir offers a glimpse of what can happen when that approach is handled with discipline.

There is plenty of musical language for describing what happens on the Festival of Praise stage. Polyphony applies. So do antiphonal singing, melisma, harmony, dynamics and rhythmic interplay.

More simply, the performance feels alive.

Much of that life comes from the singers standing behind the lead vocalist, listening closely and waiting for the precise moment when the music needs another lift.

With a backing vocalist as attentive and expressive as Mojoyinoluwa Alabi within the ensemble, the mass choir becomes more than a wall of sound. It becomes an instrument capable of stretching worship music into something immersive, controlled and deeply engaging.