The Parkville Sessions: AARON PARKS LITTLE BIG

Name: The Parkville Sessions: AARON PARKS LITTLE BIG
Start: 2025-02-08T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 1800 Park Street, Hartford, CT, United States, Connecticut 06106

Schedule

Sat, 08 Feb, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

1800 Park Street, Hartford, CT, United States, Connecticut 06106 | Hartford, CT

EARLY SHOW: Doors: 6:00 PM, Show: 7:00-8:30PM
LATE SHOW: Doors: 9:00PM, Show: 9:30-11:00PM
The Parkville Sessions reignites vibrant music culture in Hartford, CT, by transforming our historic bakery-turned-music studio into a dynamic, immersive space for world-class live performances. We invite audiences to step into a recording studio experience like no other—an intimate setting where you sit in the first two rows, fully immersed in the music. The proximity to the artists creates a direct and personal connection, amplifying the energy of each performance and offering a unique encounter with live music.
The magic of The Parkville Sessions lies in its ability to merge the intimacy of NPR's Tiny Desk concerts with the artistic caliber of New York City’s Blue Note Jazz Club. With each session professionally recorded and broadcast on YouTube, these performances don’t just stay within the walls of the studio— they extend to global audiences, making Hartford a destination for music lovers worldwide.
Natural wines and beverages will be sold by Vino Crudo.
ABOUT THE BAND: A band that endures over the course of years is bound to deepen and evolve, and that is certainly true of Aaron Parks Little Big, launched by the celebrated pianist in collaboration with guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr. and original drummer Tommy Crane. Now with new drummer Jongkuk Kim joining the fold, the group is proud to share their third album and their first on Blue Note Records.
Even more so than on their previous records, this one prioritizes a collective band identity and in-the-moment communication. It also includes compositions not only from Parks, but also from Tuohey and Ginyard. The group spent a week of intensive rehearsals and performances at Brooklyn’s ShapeShifter Lab workshopping the new material before heading up to the legendary Dreamland Recording Studio for tracking. “This feels like a really special record to me,” says Parks. “It’s simultaneously the closest to what I imagined this music sounding like, and also way beyond what I could have imagined on my own.”
Little Big continues to cultivate a productive tension between structure and spontaneity, with melodies that seem not read from a page “but more as if they’re spontaneously sung,” Tuohey says. “When the band began we would approach Aaron’s songs with clear written parts, working within a fairly tight framework with a lot of polishing and tightening.” But over time, “it’s become something of its own nature, and not always on the grid,” he says. “We’re creating something really loose and open.”
The band now has reached a place where it really feels beyond genre, seamlessly incorporating our influences from non-jazz sources in an integrated and distilled way. But it also feels riskier and more alive than ever before, and therefore in some ways it’s more jazz than ever.
Greg Tuohey - guitar
Aaron Parks - piano and keyboard
David Ginyard, Jr - bass
Jongkuk Kim - drums
These performances are generously supported by The Greater Hartford Arts Council and Falcetti Pianos.