Gospel tour's soul-baring and vocal passions

God's work, it seems, is never done. That's why, rather than resting on the seventh day, he called upon Live Nation to put together a gospel music tour, "The King's Men," and unite the top-selling salesman of the Word.

On Sunday, four formidable headliners - Kirk Franklin, Marvin Sapp, Donnie McClurkin, and Israel Houghton - laid bare their souls and their most impassioned voices at the Liacouras Center. And it was good - the three-hour-plus showing of holy music's Traveling Wilburys, to devotees of God and to his performers.

"This is all for you," Franklin said after imploring the sold-out Liacouras crowd to look upward to heaven.

Franklin was the night's ringleader. With a 17-piece band and a choir behind Franklin and his headlining cast, each man did solo sets while leaping into each other's songs for duets. As when Sapp, a brawny vocalist, added licks to Houghton's simmering "It's Not Over."

Franklin served as the gospel gig's through-line, playing grand and flowery piano runs behind McClurkin during his rousing, majestic ballad "Great Is Your Mercy," at other times jumping in with Stomp-like aplomb and conducting the big band behind his associates, and tearing into his own compositions like a man untethered to earthly concerns.

That's Franklin's thing. Beyond singing (he's given more to growls and cackles), he pumped the assembled into a devotional lather during his new-jack "Before I Die," on which Franklin's chords sounded like a '90s mix of Teddy Riley and Michael Jackson, and in the bluesy "Lookin' Out for Me."

Make no mistake: This was a team of headliners. Houghton had a gentle voice, a flickering, jazzy guitar style, and a compositional manner reminiscent of '70s-era Isley Brothers. He spoke with earnest humor about having a Caucasian mother and an African American father before lurching into the epic "Alpha & Omega." And McClurkin used a high, throaty set of vocals during his vibrantly grooving set. "We got some dancing Christians tonight," he yelled before "Again." "Dance like it's just you and Jesus."

The night's least-flashy performer was also its most moving. The deep-voiced Sapp played quiet-storm gospel-soul with few vocal runs until "My Testimony."

That song, dedicated to his wife, MaLinda, who died of colon cancer in 2010, and focusing on the power he found in God to live as a single father, found Sapp pulling out all stops, vocally and emotionally. If God didn't have his frequency set to the Liacouras that night, Sapp certainly would have caught his attention.