This month Sleepy Hollow Blues Club is doing something different and featuring one of our local legends, Gary Quick.
Quicky is an amazing keyboard player, and has been involved with many bands and musicians, and is a regular at SHBC. He began playing the piano at three years of age and played his first public performance at age five. Classical training followed soon after, then he developed a love of rock, progressive rock and fusion in his teenage years.
He has been performing live in various bands throughout Victoria over the past 38 years and has been recording his own music at his home studio for about 40 years. He’s appeared with artists such as John Farnham, Ian Moss, Choir Boys and The Black Sorrows, and has also been played piano for several local musical stage productions.
His musical taste is very eclectic, with the addition of ambient, atmospheric, experimental, improvisational, modern jazz and bluesy rock styles incorporated into his playing.
Everything has limits, I remember coming out of a venue at Wangaratta Jazz and Blues Festival, where we had watched a bloke do just about everything to an upright bass, except stroke the strings. I said, “get anything out of that?” He shook his head and said “Nup.”
Quicky now combines all of these styles into his own playing. Using piano, organ and synthesiser sounds and effects he creates any mood from light, sympathetic backing behind the other band members, to energetic solos which can be anything from tonally melodic to just plain weird (or maybe creative?)
Darren from the HouseWreckers remembers: “I recall the first time I heard the wonderful Hammond swirl of Gary’s playing and how it quickly became the icing on the HouseWrecker’s cake. It didn’t take long for Greg Trennery and I to agree on asking Gary to join us for every gig and wherever possible Gary made the trek up to Melbourne, performing at venues like the Inkerman Hotel in St Kilda and On Top Bar in Ormond.”
The Lounge Lizards’ Bill van Parreren told me, “I have known Gary (one R) since the ’70s when he played in bands like Froots, Going South etc. … We all know Gary as a great Keys man but secretly he always had the desire to play drums (he was also very good at it). So he played drums for a while as we put our songs together back in the late ’90s. I would always ask him to bring his keys along, man we had a ball, and I learnt a lot about chordal patterns through Gary’s vast musical knowledge.”
Kay Gibbons (Buxom Blues Quartet) met Gary at SHBC, “the jams we had there were sometimes quite literally out of this world and awe-inspiring. We never failed to head out on some unknown and crazy journey deep into the extremities of musical creativity. I haven’t even started on his poetry, stories, lyrics and photography yet …”
Sleepy Hollow Blues Club invites you all along to this celebration of Quicky and his music on 23 July.
Written by John Lamp
Image sourced via Sleepy Hollow Blues Club socials
