Saint John’s Quality Block Party Is Back And So Is The Signature ‘Q’
On the first day of the Quality Block Party in April, Peter Rowan got a call from fellow organizer Abigail Smith, who had just come back from Grannan Lane, a street off Germain Street. in uptown Saint John. “Do you know anything about that giant ‘Q’ hanging over the alley?” she asked him.
“No, what are you talking about?” said Rowan. “I came down to look, and there it was.”
As it turns out, Mike Duncan – who runs Duncan’s Electrical, and has an office and soon a coffee shop in the area – constructed the sign that lights up at night, and hung it in the middle of the area where the five-day music festival was going to take place.
Rowan and Duncan had chatted weeks earlier, and Rowan had said it would be nice to light up the alley. On his own initiative, Duncan came up with a solution.
“He was up there at 2 a.m. hanging this giant electric ‘Q.’ It was amazing,” says Rowan. “We didn’t solicit it. We didn’t ask him for it. He just did it out of a sense of community.”
This gesture was heartening for Rowan because the Quality Block Party was first and foremost about celebrating and nurturing a sense of community in the local music scene.
The Quality Block Party, which featured local and regional musicians, was organized to coincide with the East Coast Music Awards in Saint John, April 26-30. More than 50 bands performed at venues in the area of the Quality Block, a branding designation for decades for the retail and restaurant area on Germain Street between Princess Street and King Street.
Rowan, a music industry veteran who helped start the Halifax Pop Explosion and Pop Montreal, says the community’s enthusiasm around the Third Shift event last year made him think the city would respond to the Quality Block event too.
His instincts were correct. The crowds came to enjoy and support the array of great musicians from across the region.
“I’ve done a few of these things, and it was quite gratifying to see people respond to it,” said Rowan.
The ECMAs have come and gone, but Rowan and his fellow organizers – Abigail Smith, Cole Savoie and Corey Bonnevie – have leveraged the success of the April event to host what they hope will become a regular August festival in Saint John.
Quality Block 1.2, August 10-13, will feature nearly 70 bands at venues in the Quality Block area, including Taco Pica, Yuk Yuk’s, Five and Dime, Elwood’s, Port City Royal, Locavore and Callaghan’s. Rowan says more than 50 of them are from the region, and most are active touring bands that are making and releasing music.
He says the bands come from many genres – ranging from hip-hop to pop to electronic – but they all have a sense of community and a love of sharing music with each other and their growing fanbases.
“[The festival] is very community-minded,” he says. “The bands are inspired by their communities and their peers. We think it’s more important that you’re acknowledged and noticed by your peers, because then you’re creating an atmosphere where you’re inspired by your contemporaries and your cohorts.”
This edition of the Quality Block Party will have a younger feel, says Rowan. There will be more free all-ages shows this time around, with funding from The Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent On Recordings (FACTOR,) part of their strategy to give young bands experience performing in front of live audiences.
Rowan says the event organizers want to help nurture a live-performance scene in the region, so that bands are more confident and experienced when they go out on tour across Canada, and even the U.S. and Europe.
“You have to be able to go away and work, but to come back and know this is a place where you can be creative and be supported and experiment with your art, and fine tune it,” said Rowan, who says the organizers are also putting together Quality Block shows at Pop Montreal and the Halifax Explosion to promote New Brunswick music and give the region’s bands the opportunity to play at these big festivals.
Rowan sees the Quality Block parties as growth opportunities for regional musicians, but he knows it’s also a great time for the musicians and the community that comes out to hear them perform.
“It’s a great party,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun. People dance, people sing.”
And the “Q” will be back for Quality Block Party 1.2. It achieved a kind of “iconic” status during the April festival, says Rowan. “There were hundreds of people getting their pictures taken underneath [it].”