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 | Montreal Jubilation Choir - Founded and directed by Trevor W. PayneJubilation VI: Looking BackLabel: Justin Time | Gospel | October 20, 1994Format UPC Order # Unit Price |
Credits Van Abrahams organ (on track 2-01) Salome Bey soloist (on tracks 1-10 and 1-11) Jay Clayton soloist (on track 2-10) Sylvie Desgroseilliers soloist (on track 2-05) Kathleen Dyson soloist (on tracks 1-02, 1-06, 1-09, 1-11, 2-04 and 2-07) David Gordon soloist (on track 1-03) Nicole Johnson organ (on track 2-01) Oliver Jones piano (on track 2-03) Klaus Konig Orchestra orchestra (on track 2-10) Beatrice Langford soloist (on track 1-02) Phil Minton soloist (on track 2-10) Montreal Black Community Choir choir (on track 1-01) Jackie Richardson soloist (on tracks 2-01 and 2-02) Kim Sherwood soloist (on track 1-01) Almeta Speaks piano (on track 2-08) and voice (on track 2-08) Sonia Taylor organ (on track 2-01) Clement C. Walker soloist (on track 1-08) | TracksNo Title Duration Excerpts 1-01 I've Decided (To Make Jesus My Choice) 00:05:00 1-02 O Mary Don't You Weep 00:06:10 1-03 It Is Well With My Soul 00:04:34 1-04 Lord I Know I've Been Changed 00:02:47 1-05 Fix Me 00:02:24 1-06 How I Got Over 00:05:13 1-07 Steal Away 00:04:12 1-08 Ezekiel Saw The Wheel 00:02:39 1-09 Highway To Heaven 00:05:38 1-10 Yes God Is Real 00:09:05 1-11 I Love To Praise His Name 00:08:01 2-01 Come Sunday / Wake Up Singing (In The Morning Time) 00:12:27 2-02 Never Turn Back 00:08:11 2-03 Just A Closer Walk With Thee 00:04:06 2-04 (I Want To Ride That) Glory Train 00:03:55 2-05 Over My Head 00:05:02 2-06 Remember, O Thou Man 00:03:59 2-07 Go Tell It On The Mountain 00:03:18 2-08 Silent Night 00:05:21 2-09 Calypso Christmas Medley: Joy To The World / O Come All Ye Faithful / Les Anges Dans Nos Campagnes (Angels We Have Heard On High) 00:07:39 2-10 Set Me As A Seal 00:07:46 2-11 Tassa Improvisation 00:00:50 Liner NotesJapanese by SpringThe Gospel According To Trevor Payne In his capacity as founder and director of The Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir, Trevor Payne makes a point of learning the official language of any country he visits. Yet Payne is not content to count himself fluent only in English, French and German. He's currently in Italian immersion, and with a tour of Japan a distinct possibility within the next two years, Payne may well need to bone up on his tricky nai verbs. Juggling all those tenses and committing their conjugations to memory, Payne begins to resemble the protagonist of Ishmael Reed's uproarious Japanese By Spring. Yet Payne is no "Chappie" Puttbutt, Reed's upscale, scheming buppie who hopes that acquiring a working knowledge of Japanese and Yoruba will land him on the inside track to a window office in the ivory tower of academia. For Payne, simple linguistic courtesy is the passport to greater musical understanding; phonetics aside, he'd have Jubilation singing in Lithuanian, Outer Mongolian and Vietnamese if he could. His reasoning is simple: Give your audience what they identify with, and when you finally hit them with what you do best, they're all ears. This is the seed of Trevor Payne's musical philosophy, and one of the best explanations for the phenomenal success of The Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir over the last 12 years. By presenting gospel music as an earthy, improvised and spontaneous call-and-response form of celebration instead of the starched, buttoned-down hymns often associated with Sunday Service, Payne and Jubilation have opened it up to the diaspora of musics it gave birth to: spirituals, blues, ragtime, bebop, funk and soul: all musical forms which symbolize and document the history of the Black struggle for freedom. The unconquerable spirit celebrated in "How I Got Over" is no less absent in Ma Rainey, Albert Ayler, the Freedom Now! Suite or A Love Supreme. Payne and Jubilation have taken this uplifting, roof-raising message worldwide. In their skilled hands and voices, gospel functions much like a codex of great Black music, ancient to the future: in the music of these CDs we can hear Mahalia Jackson, Max Roach, John Coltrane, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Mavis Staples, even Prince. If gospel really is, to quote South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, water from an ancient well, then Trevor Payne is one of our finest diviners. His gospel cannot be found in any hymnal or fakebook; classic gospel songs by writers such as Isaac Watts have been uniquely arranged by Payne, who inherited perfect pitch and photographic memory from his mother. Payne combines a strong religious background and a respect for the gospel (he was raised in Barbados with many ministers in the family) with the open minded eclecticism and showmanship of a rock star (he once gigged with one of Canada's most successful soul acts ever, Trevor Payne & The Triangle) and brilliant classical technique (he majored in symphonic conducting), with enough good grooves to satisfy his R&B jones. In his salad days with Trevor Payne & The Triangle, during the 1960s, Payne was known for being able to play soul music well off the beaten path of Wilson Pickett. With the MJGC, Payne has taken gospel and pushed the divine envelope with it, creating newer and more exciting forms of spiritual music: a stirring disc of Negro spirituals (A Cappella), an eclectic collection of multi-lingual Christmas carols (Joy To The World) and a Biblical oratorio for jazz orchestra that can now be considered a modern classic of improvised music: Song Of Songs. Payne's arranging skills are evident when listening to these CDs; what the two-CD set you are holding in your hands reveals is his skill with musical ideas. Any of these discs, in lesser hands, could be cynically dismissed as high-concept "product", yet the disparate influences of each and every one contributes to the musical strength of the Choir. After all, when you can sing "Oh Happy Day" and follow it up with a jazz take on "We Three Kings" or "Calypso Christmas Medley", the effect can be dazzling. The fact that the MJGC can do both puts them in a league of their own. This is what's collected and celebrated on Looking Back, starting in 1974 at a little St-Henri church a stone's throw away from Little Burgundy and the Atwater Market. For the first time on disc we can hear the beginnings of the Jubilation Choir, as Payne leads the Montreal Black Community Youth Choir through "I've Decided" at Union United, Montreal's oldest Black community church. The Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir was formed eight years later for Union United's 75th anniversary, and you can hear the choral torch being passed at the beginning of "Mary Don't You Weep" when the adolescent voices led by Beatrice Langford and the Youth Choir suddenly grow into the powerhouse roar of Kathleen Dyson and the MJGC. Dyson is the first of many guests here that have supported Jubilation over their illustrious, 12-year career: Salome Bey, Oliver Jones, Jackie Richardson, Almeta Speaks and Phil Minton. Along the way, favourite Jubilation numbers like "I Love To Praise His Name" are restored to their original glorious live length, the instrumentation and arrangements become more unique, the material more challenging, and the rewards richer for the listener. Payne has said that when he first listened to the DAT tapes of the Montreal Black Community Youth Choir for mixing this project he could hear as far ahead as "Set Me As A Seal", the ballad and paean to the power of love from Song Of Songs that closes Looking Back. He may not have known it at the time, but 20 years ago, in need of a showstopper piece for the Youth Choir's first concert and only three weeks to do it, Trevor Payne taught his young charges a song that perfectly captures this sense of foresight. Editing out the most difficult parts, he taught them a song they wouldn't have to sing: Ernst Toch's Geographical Fugue For Speaking Chorus. In concert, it caught on like wildfire. The audience made them sing it twice. Payne would return to Toch's Fugue again and again, using it to teach pitch, balance and dynamics. It would go on to become one of the jewels in the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir's crown, and was eventually released on Joy To The World, full circle, two decades later. In between is history. Andrew Jones, August 1994 |
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