Anna Laura Quinn w/ Liz Beatty & Django Soulo @ Radio Bean

18+ | $10
7:30pm doors | 8pm show

Anna Laura Quinn (Insta | Website | Spotify | Youtube)

Anna Laura Quinn has a voice that will make you stop in your tracks. With velvety
richness and the clarity of a bell, she captures the essence of whatever song she chooses
to sing. She brings a playful spirit to her craft as a vocalist, leaning into the
improvisational essence of the jazz idiom with sincerity, humor, and graceful mutability.
Anna grew up in San Francisco in a home where music was playing constantly, and she
soaked it up like a sponge, attuning her ears to the musical prowess of greats like Ella
Fitzgerald, J.S. Bach, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and many others.
She began her journey as an artist in New York City and received a BFA in Studio Art
from New York University. After several eye- and ear- opening years in NYC, she felt the
need for a change of scenery, and in 2010 she followed a strong intuition to move to
New Orleans. The wild and beautiful Crescent City has been inspiring and nurturing her
creative growth ever since.

It was there that she truly came into her power as a musician. Formative years were
spent in the Jazz Studies program at University of New Orleans, the degree program
founded by New Orleans’ treasured musical patriarch, pianist Ellis Marsalis in 1989.
There, as the only vocalist in the company of an accomplished roster of faculty and
student instrumentalists, she honed her skills as a bandleader and arranger and earned
a Master of Jazz Studies in 2021. In the years since, she has become a dynamic presence
on the New Orleans music scene and has earned the respect of musicians of all stripes.
She performs regularly with ensembles under her own name, and with her band that she
started in 2020 called the Unmentionables, who play what she likes to call “New Orleans
Get Down Music for the People.” Her performances have beguiled audiences at such
venerable jazz venues as Snug Harbor, Preservation Hall, the Starlight Lounge, and Dos
Jefes Uptown Cigar Bar. She has also performed with the UNO All-Stars on Jazz Fest
(2019) and with her own band at French Quarter Fest (2024.)

Since 2018, Anna has worked closely with New Orleans guitarist Ed Barrett, whose
soulfulness and versatility on the guitar enable him to join her in any musical realm that
she chooses to step into. Their bond was cemented in the deepest darkest months of the
COVID lockdown in 2020, when they came together weekly to play music and started to
build the "Anna and Ed Mixtape," a list of songs from across genres in which they
discovered shared joy and meaning. Many of these songs appear on the duo's
forthcoming album–playfully titled Just… Quinn & Barrett–featuring 11 lovingly crafted
arrangements recorded in several sessions in 2023 and 2024 with New Orleans guitarist
and UNO professor Brian Seeger at the helm as engineer and producer. The featured
material comprises many styles and moods, and the album may be seen as a bridge
between each of the two musicians' major influences, including Ella and Joni plus
Blossom Dearie, Patsy Cline, Nancy Wilson, J.S. Bach, Dr. John, Bill Frisell, Tears for
Fears, Ed Bickert, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Queen, and
Bobby Charles. Just… Quinn & Barrett is scheduled for release in July 2025.
Anna has only added to her expansive palette of influences over time, and she moves
with ease and fluidity between highly personalized arrangements of American songbook
gems, songs in French and Portuguese (she is fluent in both), and surprising
interpretations of popular music from the 1960s to the present. Her two earlier
albums–an EP titled I Feel the Sudden Urge to Sing (2018) and her first full-length
record, Open the Door (Next Level/Outside In Music, 2022)–aptly demonstrate these
musical directions. As George Harris, writing in Jazz Times, observed, “Her selection of
tunes is impeccable, as is her arranging.”

In recent years, Anna has brought this repertorial melange–along with a growing
number of her own compositions–to audiences in clubs and listening rooms on tour in
the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, as well as in New York City and the
little-known jazz hotbed of Eymet, France.

In any setting, Anna will surprise and enchant you with her musical offerings. She
presents herself with astonishing radiance and honesty, her voice seeming to open like a
flower before your very eyes, what one Downbeat critic called “the inherent delight of
[her] vocal timbre.” She is propelled by her unwavering dedication to creative
authenticity and is constantly seeking out new experiences that will open the door for
personal growth, self-understanding, and a deepening sense of community. Anna hopes
that her music, and indeed all of her endeavors, may convey a spectrum of emotions and
above all a heartfelt expression of her joy.