Chris Gumbley (Alto Saxophone/Clarinet)

After graduating from Huddersfield School of Music, where he studied clarinet, piano and composition, Chris taught at Stoke-on-Trent College before being offered posts teaching saxophone at Birmingham Conservatoire and composition at Birmingham University.

An eclectic musical outlook and adaptability in his playing has led to high profile work in the past with The Temptations & Four Tops (U.K. Tours ’03 and ’05), Saxtet, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, English Chamber Orchestra, Pasadena Roof Orchestra and the Berkley Salon Ensemble, as well as theatre work and innumerable jazz gigs.

Chris has a particular interest in jazz education, with colleges and schools in UK and abroad often calling on his services in this field. He recently ran a jazz workshop for a music school in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.
In 1987 he founded Gumbles Jazz Club in Stafford, his home town, which ran for over 20 years, and even hosted his own BBC radio show, Jazzbeat, for a short while. He is a regular performer at the annual Stafford Music Festival.

Current playing projects include Tribute to Cannonball – a quintet which reproduces the sound of the great Cannonball Adderley Quintet of the 1950s and 60s – and this new show, Much Ado about Jazz – a humorous take on the world of jazz. Recent classical recitals have included performances of both the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets with members of the CBSO.

Chris’s work as an ABRSM examiner has taken him all over the world - most recently to Australia, South Africa, Singapore and Turkey. He adjudicated at the 2019 Perth Piano Competition and the 2020 Young Musician of the Caribbean in Santo Domingo.