Accordion player Gary Quinn from Galway.
There’s just no way around the truth of it—life and Facebook, they work in mysterious ways. One minute, you’re updating your status, and the next Facebook friend whom you’ve never met invites you to fly into Philadelphia to play the Philadelphia Ceili Group’s 36th Annual Traditional Irish Music and Dance Festival. (It starts this coming Thursday and runs through Saturday night at the Irish Center.)
For former All-Ireland Champion Accordion player Gary Quinn, this is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when a last minute change was made to the Festival’s line-up, and a spot became open for the Friday, September 10 Fireside Concert.
The County Galway musician was happy to take the gig. Since his debut cd, “Keep Her Lit,” launched in 2008 to critical and popular acclaim, Quinn has seen his music career take off. A performance stateside is a natural progression.
“A few years ago, I was getting near to turning 40, and I began to take my music more seriously. I’d always been playing, and writing tunes, but I decided that I mean to go out of this world the way I came in—playing music.”
Quinn isn’t kidding. He began taking accordion lessons at age 4, but a deeper interest in the chips at the nearby take-away shop caused his mother put a stop to the lessons. A year later, at age 5, Quinn was listening to the radio when a tune came on that hooked him, and he sat down and played it on his accordion.
“That was my first reel, ‘Bonnie Kate,’ and it’s still my favorite tune,” Quinn recalled. “I’ll play it next Friday night at the concert.”
“I realized that music is the international language of the world. If you can play music, you can communicate with anyone. It doesn’t matter if you can’t speak the same language … if you can sit down together and play the same 8 notes, then you can understand each other.”
Quinn immediately knew who to call to bring with him for the trip: Derry-born guitar player Anthony McGrath. “He’s a fantastic guitar player, and a really good guy. He’s played with all sorts of people.”
In fact, Quinn and McGrath joined forces recently with Limerick fiddle player Kevin Farrell and Dublin singer and bodhran player Joyce Redmond to form the band Eriuna. The name is derived from that of the celtic goddess Eriu, also the source of Ireland’s identity as Erin.
Quinn, who hails from Brierfield near Moylough in County Galway, where he still lives now with his wife and two young children, grew up in an area infused with brilliant music and brilliant musicians. His first influence was Joe Cooley, “who was a revolutionist when it came to accordion playing. You could hear his personality in his music. He played with such feeling.”
Joe Burke and Finbarr Dwyer, “both technically brilliant and fantastic players,“ also left an imprint on Quinn’s style. But it is Mairtin O’Connor that Quinn holds up as “a total gentleman. He gave me permission to record a few of his tunes on my cd.” And after the album was completed O’Connor had this to say about it: “The spirit of joyful music is alive and well in his hands and on this recording he keeps our spirits well buoyed … He is joined by some wonderful players and the overall result is a pleasure to listen to.”
Quinn could not have been more elated by this endorsement from his hero.
Many of the tunes on “Keep Her Lit” are Quinn’s own compositions, including the title track. A mechanic by trade, Quinn hears music in the whole world around him.
“I get inspiration from everything. Good feelings, happy feelings, sad feelings. For instance with “Keep Her Lit,” I could hear the tune in the lorry engine as I was working on it. I’m so fortunate to be able to combine these two things I love, playing music and working on cars.”
“I’m very, very happy right now. It’s a bit too late for me to get famous now, at 40, but my life is exactly where I want it.”
Gary Quinn and Anthony McGrath will be performing at 8PM, Friday, September 10 at The Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival, and will be teaching workshops on Saturday, September 11th from 11AM to 1PM. The Irish Center is located at 6815 Emlen Street, near the Carpenter Lane SEPTA station, in Philadelphia.
- For more information, go to the Ceili Group website.
- To read more about Gary Quinn, go to his website.