(Text by Mark Toomey/Photo courtesy of Ron Hampton)
Sometime
last year I started planning a concert to celebrate Charlie Parker’s
centenary. The idea was to have a concert similar to the one that I had
back in 2015 for my fiftieth birthday at the Saltburn Jazz Club.
For that
occasion I transcribed some of the classic quintet arrangements and I played
some Charlie Parker with Strings arrangements with a full line up, it was a
very enjoyable evening.
I decided
to have the concert on the actual day of the centenary, Saturday August 29 at St. Peter’s Church, Stockton where my daughter is a chorister.
So I
booked the church, started booking the musicians then lockdown came, so
everything was on hold and eventually, I had to sadly cancel the concert.
Fast
forward to last week, I found out that it was possible to have my quartet,
suitably distanced, playing in the church on August 29, the only
problem is that we can’t have an audience, but we could live-stream or possibly
record some tracks for uploading onto YouTube.
So the
purpose of this story is to put the word out that my quartet will be recording and hopefully* live-streaming “A
Celebration of Charlie Parker’s Centenary with The Mark Toomey Quartet” this
Saturday, August 29, at 2pm. My quartet consists of
myself on alto saxophone with Jeremy McMurray piano, Peter
Ayton bass and Paul Smith on drums.
I am
planning just a single set of Charlie Parker tunes and I am also including some
standards that are associated with him. I would
consider requests if anyone would like a certain piece but let me know before
Thursday please.
Mark Toomey
*The
reason I say hopefully, is that I am a complete beginner at live-streaming so
at the moment, I will be using Facebook with my phone on a stand, but I’m
looking into setting up a better audio system and possibly live-streaming on
YouTube also.
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