Notes on a Night at Quinn’s, Late February: Featuring Joe McPhee, Michael Bisio, Chris Corsano, Steve Swell

Steve Swell, Joe McPhee, Chris Corsano, Michael Bisio

No More Beatlemania, Once Was Enough!
It’s Time for Joe McPhee, Michael Bisio, Chris Corsano & Steve Swell Mania!

The entrance to Quinn’s is crowded. I start looking for familiar faces, but then I find myself doing math, calculating fractions, rounding, converting to percentages. Who else is masking? How do the numbers compare to my classroom? To the grocery store?  

For the first time in two years, I’m at Quinn’s to see live music, and it’s weird. Beyond the obvious emerging-from-a-pandemic reasons, Quinn’s is for sale, which kicks things in a different direction, makes me wonder how much longer this scene is going to last. Then again, I’ve had similar thoughts since I first came to Quinn’s. That’s part of what motivated me to write a book about the place—I didn’t think it could keep going. 

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The New Old Noise: A Review, of Sorts, of “The Other Night At Quinn’s,” by Mike Faloon

Say we’re in Ithaca, New York. Or in a bookstore basement in Cleveland, folding metal chairs arranged in a loose semi-circle around an institutional podium. Or even a Chicago Sunday matinee, chairs this time arranged in gunmetal rows. The trappings remain the same. So does the reception, the usual reliable in each town, former zine contributors, people in bands, friends from school. The odd reader who found one of our books and came out.

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