James Hall & Worship & Praise
Trip Down Memory Lane
Music Blend Records (2012)
Whatever happened to the church choir?
It’s a question you hear in a day and age when small ensembles led by effervescent male singers-preachers drive the deal. These groups are church concentrated: small groups of congregants, if you will, responding to the leader’s call. But as popular as they are–and there are many excellent groups out there–they are not the same as the old-fashioned church choir, the one that sat behind the pastor.
James Hall and Worship & Praise’s Trip Down Memory Lane is a salute to the big, brash church choir of the 1960s-1980s, when the techniques of O’Landa Draper and Thomas Whitfield blended with the dense, thunderous vocal harmonies of Harold Smith, James Cleveland, and Charles Craig. It was a time when groups vied for sheer numbers of voices, when less was most definitely not more.
The live album, recorded in Canada, is also a nod to Hall’s past oeuvre, albeit rearranged and modified. Nevertheless, what you hear is Worship & Praise’s signature full-throated, dramatic delivery. The choir integrates the round-chorded majesty of the senior choir with the swagger of the gospel chorus in its contrapuntal melody lines, lead singers, and tonsil-spraining volume. The result is a tsunami wave of sound.
At the same time, Hall plays around with jazz, as on “Perfect Security”/”Leave Them There.” An unidentified female vocalist with jazz in her veins fronts a big band, including a bluesy piano and warm B3, singing about the ultimate insurance policy: the Most High. The group returns to this style on “God Will,” a redux of the hymn, “God Will Take Care Of You.”
While some lyrics are straight praise, others, such as “Pressing On” and “The Storm,” are the songs of faith and encouragement, respectively, that have been the mainstay of gospel music for eighty-plus years.
Acknowledgement of the fine lead singers that appear here and there on the album would have improved the liner notes, which do indicate what musicians played on what track. Also a pew-burner like Hall’s retread of the Davis Sisters’ “Wont It Be Wonderful,” recorded a couple of years ago with the Voices of Citadel, would have been a fine addition.
Nevertheless, for a sonic blast-from-the-church-past, you can’t go wrong with Trip Down Memory Lane.
Four of Five Stars
Picks: “Perfect Security”/”Leave Them There,” “God Will”/“I’ve Got To Praise Him.”
James Hall & Worship & Praise 
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