Some artists want to continually reinvent themselves, but U.S. vocal group Take 6 has another aim: familiarity. Or at least that’s the idea behind its upcoming album Iconic, due for release on April 27.

“What we’ve done,” the a cappella sextet’s founder and leader Claude McKnight explains from his Los Angeles home, “is we’ve taken some really amazing songs from over the years—I mean, everything from the ’50s to right now—and we’ve voted on those songs. And all the ones that got at least four votes—and most of them got five or six votes—got onto the album. We figured we could take any one of the songs from this album and sing it anywhere in the world, and someone would probably know the song.”

McKnight isn’t about to spill all the beans about what’s going to be on Take 6’s new LP—surprise is a value, too—but he’s willing to admit that he and his fellow singers have worked up some of them for their upcoming Vancouver appearance, sponsored by Chor Leoni. (The local men’s choir will also join Take 6 on-stage for at least a couple of numbers.)

One, at least, will be the Beatles staple “Got to Get You Into My Life”, a favourite of R&B singers since the Four Tops covered it in 1969. “We’re basically doing the Earth, Wind & Fire version of it,” McKnight says, a fact that attests to his ensemble’s uncanny ability to replicate a full band with just its voices and, occasionally, percussion.

“I started the group as a quartet, with what would be considered almost barbershop-style harmonies, way back in the day when I was a freshman at Oakwood College, a Seventh-day Adventist university in Huntsville, Alabama,” McKnight explains. “And because we all had a love for jazz, we decided to add a couple more people to the group, because that enabled us to do chords that had more notes in them. So we’re basically what we consider to be a jazz vocal group that happens to be a cappella.”

Standard operating practice, he continues, is for one of the sextet’s lower voices to take on a jazzy bass line, while the others divide up between melody, harmony, and chordal accompaniment. “We can have two or three guys on top, doing horn parts, and then a couple of other guys who are filling in the chords,” McKnight says. “Or you can have block chords where all six of us are basically the piano, as it were—where you have the entire chord being spelled out in kind of a linear fashion by all the guys. Or you can have a solo on top, a walking bass line, and still have four notes within the chord moving. There’s all kinds of ways to skin a cat as far as the arrangements are concerned.”

One thing that has remained the same since 1980, however, is the group’s engaging, up-with-people demeanour, which the genial McKnight attributes to a combination of temperament and gospel roots. “Who you are always comes through, whatever kind of music you do,” he says. “If you’re being honest with yourself and authentic, then that comes out. So whether we’re singing a pop-style song or jazz or whatever, there’s always a soulful spirituality to what it is that we do—and, yeah, we can’t get away from that.”

Chor Leoni presents Take 6 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Friday (April 6), as part of the Van/Man Male Choral Summit.