Philly Guitarist Dirk Quinn releases Sophomore Gem with “Quinntet”

By Rob Nagy

For jazz guitarist Dirk Quinn life as a professional musician has been a liberating yet exhaustive climb to create a niche in a sea of talent vying for notoriety. Now, more than two decades after strapping on a guitar, Quinn has experienced the high and lows of a struggling artist while honing his guitar skills and creating a style that sets him apart from the rest of the pack. Currently fronting the Dirk Quinn Band, Quinn has most recently released his sophomore effort “Quinntet”, featuring nine fresh compositions from an artist whose career is on the rise with his best work still to come.

Quinn grew up in the rural Philadelphia suburb of Green Lane, located near Quakertown. Latching onto music at a young age, Quinn’s mother taught him his first guitar chords and he was off and running. Sacrificing the social temptations of a teenager, Quinn spent all of his free time mastering his
self taught guitar skills. Influenced by guitar greats Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour and Jimmy Page, he was determined to make his way as a professional guitarist. Following high school Quinn earned an engineering degree from Penn State University landing a job as a computer programmer, something that paid the bills but didn’t feel right to Quinn as he soon grew tired of the corporate world opting to focus his energy on playing guitar. “One day I realized that I was committing nine hours a day to a job that was making
someone else lots of money”, recalls Quinn. “I thought that if I commit nine hours a day to my own career there is no way I can fail. So that’s what I did, I just quit with no back-up plan to pursue the guitar.” Quinn
sold his car, slept on friends sofas and started his own band playing long hours barely making ends meet. “I started hustling playing music people wanted to hear”, recalls Quinn. “So I fell into this trap of playing cover
music when what I really wanted to do was play originals. I did it for five years. It just killed my soul when I started seeing people come to the shows and we would get requests for only cover songs. This is not what I
wanted to do so I quit and turned to teaching guitar.” Quinn spent the next ten years giving lessons while performing live with every opportunity. “This was a great move”, recalls Quinn. “Teaching really pushed me to get my own act together. You can’t just be like ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing?’ you have to have it internalized. This is when my eyes were opened and I realized ‘Wow there’s so much to learn about music.’” Quinn’s efforts did not go to waste as he continued to master his instrument. In 2007 Quinn made his long awaited recording debut releasing his self titled CD. “It took me over a year non-stop every day to record this CD”, recalls Quinn. “I wanted to be able to put it next to anything that was out there. I would
retake and retake solos. I’ve since learned that perfection doesn’t mean every note is in the right spot that is the human side” Armed with an impressive CD, Quinn now had the invaluable promotional piece to share his
guitar skills with the world. Working the club and coffee house circuit, Quinn became increasingly in demand over time playing as many as two gigs a day anywhere and everywhere while getting the occasional call to share the stage with a variety of more established jazz artists. With each performance Quinn won over more fans doing what any great artist would do, building a fan base one by one on his own merits, a philosophy that continues to pay off for Quinn. “I’m really hustling”, says Quinn. “It gets better every month. It most certainly gets better every year. I can’t complain. I am better off than I was last year and, hopefully I can
continue the momentum.”

Most recently Quinn has released his follow-up CD “Quinntet, offering a collection of vibrant and uplifting originals that show the diverse talent and gift of artistry that Quinn provides. Every track is flawless and
beautifully produced taking the listener on a musical journey that flows from one song to the next with the precision of a seasoned veteran.  Particular standouts include, “Evil Birdman of Funk”, “Money Bus”, “Emaj7th
Jam”, and “Good Ol’ Fashioned Gospel Throwdown”. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing retakes like I did on the first albums”, says Quinn. “I wanted first takes not overdubs. I felt like the live recordings said
something the first album didn’t and I think we achieved it with this second album. It has a live quality to it.” With two releases under his belt and an extensive run of on-going live performances, Quinn is at a crossroads as he now looks to take his career to the next level. “I need somebody that can put me in front of audiences”, says Quinn. “Somebody that is great at the business part and knowing where I fit and knowing the demographic that I should be playing for so I can concentrate on the music.  I feel like I’ve found my art and I want to devote as much time to that as possible. In a year I would like to be hitting the east coast hard” added Quinn. “Hitting as many festivals as possible and getting some sort of recognition nationally.” To learn more about Dirk Quinn go to www.dirkquinn.com or http://www.myspace.com/dirkquinn

The Dirk Quinn Band plays Steel City Coffee House in Phoenixville, PA. on
Saturday 11/22/08 at 8:30 P.M. Joining Quinn on stage will be Anibal Rojas.
Tickets are $12 adv./ $15 DOS./ Don’t miss this amazing night of Jazz!

Photo by Rob Nagy

FORMER-BEATLE PETE BEST CONTINUES TO ENJOY REBIRTH WITH THE RELEASE OF “HAYMAN’S GREEN”.

By Rob Nagy

On the surface it would appear that former Beatle drummer Pete Best is the most unfortunate man in the world. When delving deeper into his psyche there couldn’t be anything further from the truth. While Best has certainly had to overcome the stigma that has been attached to his name for too many years, he has worked tirelessly to reinvent himself while continuing to experience a life and music career that has been more than gratifying on a personal and professional level. Now more than four decades after his abrupt departure from the fab four, Best is thriving on his own merits. Approaching his twenty first year fronting his own band, Best is taking nothing for granted while looking to the future with his latest release “Hayman’s Green”.
Pete Best first caught the attention of the Quarrymen, the original incarnation of what would become the Beatles, in the summer of 1960 while playing drums for the Black Jacks, one of Liverpool’s many local bands at the infamous Casbah. In need of a drummer the Quarrymen asked Best to join the band as they were about to embark on their inaugural visit to Hamburg, Germany. Best jumped at the chance, joining John, Paul and George for a two year run that would last until 1962, giving Best the distinguished and lasting title as the Beatles first drummer. He would go on to play on some of the Beatles earliest recordings setting the tone for the impending “Beatlemania” craze that would eventually take over the world. In June of 1962 the Beatles auditioned for future Beatle producer George Martin, at the now legendary Abbey Road Studios, resulting in Martin taking the band under his direction. It wasn’t long before Martin chose to replace Best with another local drummer Ringo Starr. Both Best and the many Beatle fans were stunned by the news. While a definitive answer as to why he was fired has never been completely known, with rumors circulating that he wasn’t proficient enough on the drums or that he was taking the attention of female fans from other members of the band, there is one thing that is certain, Best was the victim of a bad break that most would have found difficult to rebound. By 1962, with Best out of the picture, the Beatles were creating a huge buzz in Liverpool and beyond. One year later they made their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show playing to millions of TV viewers. Overnight the Beatles became the toast of America and soon the rest of the world. At any given time a Beatles song could be heard on numerous radio stations. Their faces were plastered on magazine covers as well as every possible souvenir item publicists and marketers could muster. Best now had to contend with the stigma of being an ex-Beatle and he was routinely approached as to the reasons why he was replaced. He continued with his drumming for a period of time before calling it quits and moving into a variety of career directions that found him first earning a living as a baker before settling into a civil servant position. Best moved into the shadows of a post Beatle world choosing to remain silent in an attempt to live a normal life. In time any bitterness that Best harbored began to dicipate as he began to give interviews, writing a book about his time with the Beatles and even serving as a technical advisor for the TV movie “Birth of the Beatles”. All of this led to Best’s eventual return to the stage, in the 80’s, as the leader and drummer for the first incarnation of the Pete Best Band. In 1995 the surviving members of the Beatles released their anthology, which included a number of tracks featuring Pete Best on drums. Best received a much deserved and substantial financial gain from this release, however he was still shunned by the living Beatles when he was not interviewed for the accompanying book and documentary. Even his picture was visibly cut out of the cover photo and replaced with one of Ringo Starr. As the years passed Best continued to go about his life while the other Beatles continued to grab fame and fortune at a staggering rate. In 1988 Best played a concert in Liverpool, his first in many years. Expecting this to be a one shot deal he decided it was time to get back into show business. Tours and recording sessions soon followed and Best was now gaining much deserved attention for his drumming skills while being publicly acknowledged as an integral part of the Beatle movement.
Twenty years later Best now finds himself very much at peace with his life and career performing concerts all over the world as well as producing music documentaries. Over the past two years, In between family obligations and being on the road, Best has finally released his long anticipated solo album “Hayman’s Green”. Featuring eleven original songs showcasing the talents of a very diverse and still viable band, “Haymans’ Green”, is a treat for any music or Beatle fan offering up the best works of Pete Best to date. Standout songs include “Step Outside”, “Run and Around”, “Gone”, “Everything I Want” and the title track “Hayman’s Green”. “This record is very special to us”, says Best. “It’s the first album with this particular line-up of the band, which has been together for about seven years now. In a way it’s my life story in music so to speak so it’s very important that everything was done the best it could be. So far it has been received with great acclaim. People have been asking us for years”, added Best, “Do you have original material? And we said ‘Yes’ but there has to be a time and a place for it. So it’s great to actually stand up and say ‘Here is the original material you wanted.’” While Best could have taken advantage of his Beatle connection years ago, he has built a solid career on his own efforts “it’s been fantastic for us”, says Best. “There’s lots of family who have stood by me. Great band who knows the type of music I want. They all know my story. So when you got that going for you, you got the appreciation of the audience whose recognized what you are trying to do and are aware of what you’ve done. Hopefully we stand tall for many, many years to come.” For more info on Pete Best go to www.petebest.com www.myspace.com/thepetebestband

Art exhibit at Earthmart

Matt talks with Michael Biddison about his unique art work being displayed at Earthmart through the month of November

Talking with the guys from
Old School Freight Train

Father of underground comics goes uptown

by RON TODT

Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA — As a lonely teenager, Robert Crumb vowed to use his artistic talent to become famous to take revenge on those who had rejected him.

But it was a tour through the drug-laced San Francisco of the 1960s that brought him fame as the father of underground comics. His satiric, surreal and sometimes sexually explicit images helped illustrate the emerging counterculture and chronicled what he has called the “seamy side of America’s subconscious.”

Compared to Brueghel and Goya and denounced as a pornographic misogynist, Crumb finds his work popping up these days in fine art museums throughout the world. Now the 65-year-old artist is having a homecoming of sorts in Philadelphia in “R. Crumb’s Underground,” a career-spanning exhibition of more than 100 works, on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art through Dec. 7.

“It was just a matter of the art world actually catching up to him,” said Todd Hignite, editor of Comic Art Magazine, who curated the show for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last year. “He’s been so influential not only to practically every cartoonist following in his wake, but a lot of gallery artists are really influenced by him as well.”

The exhibition traces Crumb’s trip from the psychedelic ‘60s to recent collaborations with his wife, fellow cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Included are familiar images such as Fritz the Cat and the “Keep on Truckin”’ line of men with giant shoes strutting across the landscape. But the exhibit also features comics Crumb drew as a boy, and offbeat efforts such as faces painted on spools and a life-size contorted “Devil Girl” statue.

Born here on Aug. 30, 1943, Crumb began drawing at the urging of his comic-obsessed brother, Charles. He moved to Cleveland as an adult and worked as a commercial illustrator, drawing greeting cards.

In 1965, Crumb started experimenting with LSD, which immediately helped him create some of his best-known characters. In January 1967, he hitched a ride to San Francisco just in time for the full flowering of the hippie movement. His images echoing old-time cartoon styles, first in Philadelphia’s Yarrowstalks and later in his own Zap Comix, helped define the underground comic stew of sex- and drug-themed surrealism and antiestablishment sentiment.

Flower Power faded, but Crumb kept working, steadily publishing in such magazines as Weirdo and Self-Loathing Comics. He also illustrated many of Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor” accounts of his mundane life in Cleveland, which were adapted for film in 2003.

Art critic Robert Hughes has called Crumb “the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century,” casting him in a tradition of graphic arts as social protest and seeing elements of Goya in his grotesqueness.

“Crumb’s material comes out of a deep sense of the absurdity of human life,” Hughes said in “Crumb,” a 1994 documentary. “At a certain psychic level, there aren’t any heroes, villains or heroines. Even the victims are comic.”

Others decry his satiric stereotypical portrayals of black characters, and feminist writers have seen pornography and hostility toward women. Former Mother Jones editor Diedre English has called Crumb’s work the product of an “arrested juvenile vision.”

That such criticism came early is evidenced by a 1971 strip, “A Word With You Feminist Women,” in which Crumb acknowledges the brutality against women in some of his comics but says he is portraying and not advocating it. The strip, however, devolves into a rant in which he tells his detractors that he will draw whatever he pleases. Another commentary shows him throttling a comely TV interviewer who started to psychoanalyze his work.

In 2005’s “The R. Crumb Handbook,” the artist said his black characters “are not about black people but are more about pushing these ‘uncool’ stereotypes in readers’ faces, so suddenly they have to deal with a very tacky part of our human nature.” He acknowledged, however, being occasionally embarrassed looking back on some of the work.

“That imagery is offensive, and it’s imagery that exists in the culture, and he’s trying to get beneath that imagery … and see what sort of mind-set created that imagery,” Hignite said. “Nothing he does is ever done for superficial shock value; it’s always part of a larger project to get at the heart of what this is about in America.”

Crumb, who declined to be interviewed, is as hard on himself as on others, appearing frequently in his strips as a neurotic, sexually obsessed misanthrope. A self-portrait in the exhibition shows him with hair standing on end, eyes bulging, teeth bared in a grimace, holding a sign saying, “My true inner self.”

In some ways, his association with the ‘60s was something of a mismatch. For example, he never had any use for rock music; he collected early blues and jazz records since boyhood and played banjo in such bands as the 1920s-style Cheap Suit Serenaders. The exhibition includes a set of 36 watercolor trading cards of early jazz greats.

Red Molly storms into Chaplin’s

By Christine Gibboni

First Correspondent

SPRING CITY — Hailing from the autumnal paradise that is New York’s Hudson Valley, acoustic trio Red Molly will be bringing a sweet musical treat this Halloween in the form of two 40 minute acoustic sets at Chaplin’s in Spring City. With vocals as crisp and refreshing as the October air, the girls of Red Molly have created their own delicious concoction of folk, americana and bluegrass sounds that will have you hooked after just one listen.

Formed in 2004 during a campout at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, Red Molly released their first full length album, “Never Been to Vegas” in 2006, which eventually landed among WUMB Boston’s Top 10 CD’s of ‘06. Their second album, “Love and Other Tradgedies” dropped just this year and is regarded as a more polished collection of Red Molly’s unique narrative harmonies. The album includes more original songs penned by bandmembers Laurie, Abbie and Carolann, as well as classic gospel and bluegrass standards that sound just divine sung in the girls’ warm, soulful voices.

So round up the kids, hire a babysitter to deal with the sugar rush and treat yourself to a little Red Molly at Chaplin’s this Halloween at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased through Chaplin’s will-call at 610-792-4110 or at the door the night of the show.

Matt Talks with Dirk Quinn of The Dirk Quinn Band

Mystic Rebel

Mystic Rebel has been tearing up the east coast with a burning reggae show that has kept them on the lips of thousands of music fans and top promoters for the last three years.  As one of the more successful bands touring the eastern seaboard, the band was voted top ten “best of fest’ at the Bethlehem Musikfest 2006.

Mystic Rebel will feature the addition of original reggae music and of course the classic reggae tunes we all know and love.

Black Dog

Led Zeppelin shook the world of rock & roll for little more than a decade, but their legacy lives on stronger than ever. Masters of creativity and diversity, their music covers such a wide range of styles and genres that they are difficult to define. Their collective talent remains unmatched and unchallenged.
There will never be another Led Zeppelin.
Their songs are still aired regularly, and their recordings are being bought in droves by new generations, but fans of the band still crave the raw energy of a live show.
Enter Black Dog.
Black Dog proudly pays tribute to the mighty Led Zeppelin with an extensive catalogue of songs comprised of classic masterpieces like “Dazed and Confused”, “Heartbreaker”, and “Stairway to Heaven”, as well as the less heard  B-sides to satisfy the more discerning fans.
A complete acoustic set recreates an intimate setting with mandolin and custom tuned guitars played on stools, bringing to life songs like “Going to California”, “Friends”, and “That’s the Way”.
The show also includes extended versions that recapture the true live experience such as The Song Remains the Same’s “Whole Lotta Love”, complete with Page’s magical Theramin solo!
The members established the band in early 2000, and they are all accomplished musicians with considerable experience. Black Dog is the definitive Led Zeppelin tribute band.
Keeping the music of Led Zeppelin Live!

Dirk Quinn Band

Dirk Quinn is a Philadelphia based jazz/funk guitarist who has utilized nearly a decade of constant performing to develop a unique and progressive style. His recently released sophomore album entitled “QuinnTet” features “thoughtful, original melodies flowing seamlessly over groove-heavy rhythms; intricate song structures giving way to strongly expressive, organic improvisations.” Drawing inspiration from music of all types, his solo acoustic sound has been compared to the guitar “pyrotechnics” of Keller Williams and Michael Hedges, while his full band compositions bear resemblances that range from the honest, urban funk of Soulive to the brave experimentation of Medeski, Martin and Wood.

Initially attracted to the guitar after being introduced to classic rock giants such as Led Zeppelin and The Who, Dirk’s thirst for the unique and bizarre soon had him jamming along to the more radical and daring Mahavishnu Orchestra and the humorous, bass-laden noise of Primus.

Playing virtually non-stop with countless musical projects afforded him ample opportunity to hone his chops. It wouldn’t be long before the refining of his own artistic message coupled with a fresh, new outlook and a deeper musical/life philosophy opened up to him the world of jazz. Miles, Coltrane, Monk and Brubeck along with the more contemporary sounds of Bela Fleck, John Scofield, Ahmad Jamal and Jaco Pastorius began heavily influencing his musical direction. Liberated by the idea of free improvisation, he was finally able to realize and focus his musical vision.

The new CD exhibits a musical confidence and a genuine excitement for this unique brand of groove-oriented jazz. Surrounding himself with a group of extremely talented and like-minded musicians, Dirk has been playing shows up and down the east coast while receiving an ever increasing amount of media attention. Locally, the music has been put in a regular rotation on Philadelphia’s 90.1 WRTI and 97.5-2 WJJZ-HD2. Nationally, he gets spins on XM Radio’s Beyond Jazz channel as well as on “The Groove Boutique” - a syndicated jazz/funk program that’s broadcast on FM in 13 cities nationwide. Dirk and the band have also performed live on Fox 45’s morning program in Baltimore and have had the great pleasure of guesting on Gene Shay’s Sunday night radio show on WXPN in Philadelphia.

Since the inception of the Dirk Quinn Band at the beginning of 2007, and with no management or booking agent to speak of, the quintet has already landed some prestigious bookings - including a slot at Bethlehem’s Musikfest, three performances on the main stage at World Cafe Live, as well as shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Fillmore at the TLA - and have been honored to share the stage with such legends as Chico Huff (Pat Martino, John Swana), Jef Lee Johnson (George Clinton, David Sanborn), and Sam Kininger (Soulive).

The band’s high energy and musical interplay routinely attract listeners that are admittedly more accustomed to lyric-based music. With great melodic sensibilities, rhythmic experimentation and an accessible modern edge, the Dirk Quinn Band is jazz/funk improvisation at its most exciting!

http://www.dirkquinn.com/home.html