The Artists' Quarter Lives On

Like many other folks, I was saddened with the Twin Cities' best jazz club, the Artists' Quarter, closed at the end of 2013.

I have a bit of a bias; I was a long time friend of the club; having ran the club's website from its inception at the end of 1998 until I left Minneapolis for Chicago in 2006. I was proud to help owner Kenny Horst bring people in the door, and build up the email list from zero to thousands-- the email list had over 5,000 subscribers in 2006 -- not bad for a local business. It was easy to gauge the reach of the email list -- all I had to do was include a typo in a cover charge price, which happened accidentally on occasion, and it seemed like everybody through the door that night wanted to receive the discounted, typo'd price. That wasn't my preferred method of proving that the website and email list actually connected with folks, but it surely proved the point.

In 2006, my friend Don Berryman took over the AQ website and managed it under his own steady hand. After our successful and fun AQ New Year's Eve 2015 pop-up event at Hell's Kitchen, we realized that it no longer made sense to continue running the dynamic-content laden incarnation of the website with its associated technical and financial overhead. But instead of shutting down the Artists' Quarter website, we've transitioned it in a way that will allow us to keep it alive for the long term. You'll see that it's still out there at http://www.artistsquarter.com, awaiting your visit. But now, we're focusing on the history of the club, video clips from various musical acts over the years, and links to insightful articles with more detail, including Pamela Espeland's fabulous "Pleased and Flipped: Memories of the AQ" series, and the occasional shout out when a musician known to grace the AQ stage gets a solid mention elsewhere.

The site's now hosted on Blogger; Google's free blogging platform. This allows us to post and share content easily, while eliminating any hosting costs beyond the regular renewal of the domain name.