Review
“It’s tempting to idealize the ‘artist’ mentality here and say something sappy like, ‘If not music, then life would be a mistake’, but I’m pretty sure that I could be just as poor and happy doing pretty much anything…There’s art in everything.”- Dirk Quinn
Well, when Dirk Quinn isn’t quoting Nietzsche, he’s making music. The Dirk Quinn Band has just released their third album aptly titled, Live at Home. It’s a compilation of songs recorded on the road in the Philadelphia area, and serves as a testament to their uniquely aggressive, instrumental improvisational repertoire. This album is labeled as “Jazz” for which several names may come to mind: Bird Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis—perhaps, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, or, cringingly, Kenny G. If you’ve read about the Dirk Quinn Band, you may have seen references to Medeski, Martin, and Wood or John Scofield, and this is fine—but I’d like to suggest you suspend the urge to slap a label on the music and style of the DQB.
