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A jazz musician playing spirituals? In a sense that is what Louis Armstrong has been doing all along. A few other features need to be pointed out. The second chorus in Down By The Riverside starts with a break (the steady rhythm being interrupted for an instant) just the way it is in dozens of work songs. In This Train there is a so-called stop-time interlude, which Louis Armstrong used so successfully in several of his instrumental renderings during the ’20s. The “call and response” formula can be heard in This Train, Didn’t It Rain and Go Down Moses.
For me, Louis Armstrong’s greatest talent is the way he handles the exposition of a melody. The trumpet solo in Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and Down By The Riverside show what I mean. Of course his play is forceful and convincing. But there are suspensions; almost imperceptible melodic changes showing his offbeat rhythm. All this will immediately and most directly bring out the melody, enhancing it to a point of opening up new vistas that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The arrangements are by Sy Oliver, who was also the musical director. Oliver’s career as a trumpeter-composer-arranger goes back to the time of Zack Whyte’s orchestra in the early ’30s and he, more than anyone else, crated the style of Jimmy Lunceford’s powerful orchestra between 1933 and 1939.
Side One
1. Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen
2. Shadrack
3. Go Down Moses
4. Rock My Soul (In The Bosom Of Abraham)
5. Ezekiel Saw De Wheel
6. On My Way (Got On My Travelin’ Shoes)
Side Two
1. Down By The Riverside
2. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
3. Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child
4. Jonah And The Whale
5. Didn’t It Rain
6. This Train
