Quartet Night

I had a great time last night singing with the group for Quartet Night at Christ Community Church in Laguna Hills. In 35 years of gospel music work I've traveled all over the country, but never before have I done a concert within a mile of my house. Boy was that nice.

Here are the guys doing their thing:

We were singing in the brand new auditorium at Christ Community Church. When I say 'brand new', I'm not just kidding. They got a temporary occupancy permit just to allow the concert to go on. They won't even hold their first church services there until December 7th.

We were joined by The Glory Gates Quartet, which is based at Christ Community Church, and The Cross Road Quartet. Rich McIntyre, the lead singer for Glory Gates, was also the project manager for the new church building and thankfully kept everything on schedule so the concert could go on as planned. We set the concert date back in July and for awhile we weren't sure the building would be completed on time.

It was a great evening, though not without its challenges. My baritone singer lives in Riverside, and thanks to the multiple fires had to divert dozens of miles out of his way to get to Laguna Hills due to multiple freeway closures. His drive, which should have taken 45-60 minutes, ended up taking 3 hours.

A couple of the guys in Cross Road live in Diamond Bar, and that area was also cut off by the closure of the 57 freeway. They had to slog it down surface streets and took over 2 hours to get to South County. I'm also aware of some fans who couldn't get there because of fire problems in their neighborhoods or the freeway closures.

Despite all of that the house was nearly full and we all had a great evening of quartet music. Hopefully we'll all get the chance to do it again sometime.