The longer you wander around Montreal’s downtown core at the height of its summer festival season, the more you realize this is a city built for music, and a city built by music
“Don’t make me blush, y’all,” said Samara Joy, a 22-year-old jazz singer from the Bronx, to a few thousand spectators at Montreal’s Place des Festivals.
But not all the crowds are on the streets. A bewildering 30 indoor venues – plush-seat theatres, standing-room-only rock halls – make up the larger, kilometre-square Quartier des Spectacles, which extends several blocks from either side of Place des Arts. In other cities, concert venues struggle; here, the festivals sustain the halls.
Much of the planning for this year’s festival happened during the massive surge in infections caused by the coronavirus’s Omicron variant. It was a leap of faith; Saulnier and his team were hiring bands for the summer while a winter curfew made it illegal to be outside after 10 p.m. They made adjustments, increasing the budget for outdoor concerts by half in case audiences weren’t ready for enclosed spaces.
I decided to concentrate on artists I hadn’t seen in person, younger musicians whose stars are rising and about whom I wanted more information. One was Joy. Jazz needs gateway stars who can lure crowds in from poppier genres, and Porter comes by his success honestly. His six-piece band was stacked with strong soloists. His voice, deep but tart, navigated elaborate lyrics. “Like bare feet on hot concrete, we have come to some division/Based on pain from bad decisions/Just like clothespins snapped by wild winds/Sometimes you can’t hold on to love that never dies,” he sang. The crowd ate it up.
The club setting permitted something longer and more intense than an hour on an outdoor stage. And it was here that Julian Lage, a 34-year-old California guitarist, played on the festival’s first night. Lage was the subject of a documentary film when he was 8, and performed at the Grammys at 12. He’s grown up with guitars, as his uncanny dexterity makes clear. His vocabulary comes from classic rock and blues, T-Bone Walker and Duane Eddy as much as the jazz canon.
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