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The Arc Choir

Okay, here is one thing that I would really like to be able to do here on this blog, music reviews. This week, The Arc Choir's "Walk With Me" album [more info].

This album is great and is perfect for February, Black History Month. This collection of gospel music is performed by the Arc Choir, the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Gospel Choir. It is truely amazing. Here is what Fred Kaplan wrote in 1997 concerning the ARC choir.

"Before you slip on The ARC Gospel Choir's Walk With Me [Mapleshade], be forewarned: this is no soothing daisyfield of New Age serenity. ARC stands for the Addicts Rehabilitation Center of East Harlem, its singers are former druggies whose souls were wrested from the flames of hell by the Hand of Jesus, and they want you to know the joy of their redemption. This is raw, raucous stuff, thirty-two proud, strong voices crooning, hollering, and sweetly harmonizing as if at the portals of Heaven's gate, hands clapping, feet stomping, swaying to the tough-love discipline of a tight ensemble order. Pierre Sprey, Mapleshade's proprietor-engineer, captures every ounce of it, with an analogue tape recorder and three PZM microphones — a pair mounted on either side of his custom Plexiglas wedge, another single mic lightly spotlighting the basses. Hamiett Bluiett, the baritone saxophone player who has produced several Mapleshade discs, led Sprey to the choir and to the church where he recorded them. As Sprey says in the liner-notes, "The acoustics were just right for recording a choir: warm and reverberant but crystal clear so that individual voices wouldn't be lost in a haze of murky echo." You've got a front-pew seat at the Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ, the dynamics quake and thunder, and even a heathen like me can't help but be inspired. "

Check it out.