As a fellow minister with the Assemblies of God our church no longer has Sunday night services. I attend Northridge Church in White House, TN which is one of the fastest growing Assembly of God churches in the nation. But on Sunday evenings I sometimes visit at River of Life. The worship is powerful and Lari Goss is doing an excellent job with the choir. Brother Minick is a good friend and I will defend him and whatever he is involved in. He made a God appointed decision when he brought Lari Goss to his staff of ministers.

Wayne, no hard feelings…???

Lari Goss has not signed on to work for River Bend exclusively. Some sites are still displaying the original press release, but an corrected version has since been issued.

Pretty impressive that Wayne responds (and for the record, I love both arrangers, but I’ll take Wayne any day).

The deal? I haven’t a clue, but like Avery, it does seem like it wasn’t needed, but what do I know?

I believe Goss is a member of River of Life Church now, and his association with the Minicks through the church probably influenced his decision.

I’m one who has appreciated and enjoyed Goss’ work since I first heard it in the early 70’s. When he and his brothers were doing custom albums out of Atlanta their work made a lot of regional groups sound better than they would have otherwise. When Benson began increasing budgets to allow for orchestration on some of their projects, Goss’ work helped shape and define that era’s sound. Whereas Rick Powell (another great arranger although in a totally different style) had done a lot of good work and Ronn Huff (again, different approach/style) was just beginning to make his mark in Nashville, Goss began to create colors and textures in orchestral sound that enhanced both the given group’s vocals and the overall production values of the projects.

Can he go over the top at times? Sure. And if you listen to a lot of his charts back to back there are obvious (and easy-to-anticipate) progressions, chord and key changes and a tendency to go a little heavy with similar instrumentation. But that can also work in a group’s favor: to my surprise, when I first heard Signature Sound’s cut of “This Could Be The Dawning” a few years ago, it was very close to a chart he did of the same tune for The McDuff Brothers back in 1971. Still, I’ve never found his work lacking the ability to bring something unique to almost any project and indeed his arrangements on some tunes have been the key musical element that helped define them as classics.

I don’t know Wayne Haun or much about his background. But whether he’s a prodigy of Goss or not, his work, though similar in style, shows a bit of lightness in the texturing and a somewhat more restrained approach, almost under-orchestrating a piece rather than pushing it to the max. There are other arrangers who do good work in SG but honestly I think there’s a distinct and definable difference between Haun’s and Goss’ work and most everyone else’s.

That’s why I too find the Minick arrangement surprising. I don’t see any apparent advantages for Goss but as you say, it could be a matter of semantics; what exactly does “exclusive agreement” mean in this context?

If you’d like a better picture of a Minick-Goss effort, a trip to www.myspace.com/myaaron is in order. Non-SG warning.

I guess as long as you’re under contract, you would be, in theory, getting a salary, which is something that independant producers/writers/arrangers don’t always get.