Entering Central Park, I catch a measure of “Summertime.” A jazz quartet playing Gershwin’s memorable melody makes themselves heard for an instance, before the ambient noise gives way to a breakdance crew’s beatbox, alongside the playful shouts of children, the bustle of the city a block away, and just up ahead, the rumble of Gang Gang Dance playing this most famous of city parks’ Summerstage. George Gershwin made his name on Tin Pan Alley, just a few blocks south in midtown Manhattan. Spending time in New York City is always a little surreal when you think about how much history — especially musical history — has happened here: from Gershwin’s Jazz Age to the Greenwich Village folk scene; from the early minimalists’ drone experiments to the Velvets, Suicide and CBGBs; no wave and disco mutating alongside the birth of hip-hop; Sonic Youth paving the way to today’s indie renaissance in Brooklyn.

Coming from Toronto, a city only just starting to assert its cultural identity, New York often stirs up one of the seven deadly sins. Simply put, envy is wanting what someone else has — and the corollary of that is not appreciating what you do. This can of course lead down the path of cynical negativity, and its that mindset that held Toronto back for so many years — “we’ll never be as cool as New York, London, Paris, etc.”  — and, I would argue, the prevailing non-wisdom that the (vanity link alert!) Torontopia movement originally defined itself again. But knowing the dangers, allow me to engage in some cultural envy.

Two visits to other municipalities have made me aware of something we’re missing: the opportunity to hear amazing, original music out of doors. Look, it’s summer (still!). Who wants to be inside a stinky club breathing stale air? During the summer months, the music scene should be synonymous with sun, surf, BYOB and blankets. Parks and beaches should be our venues, and our hard-working club owners should go on vacation. It’s also a time when music should be accessible to everyone, not just the privileged elites of those “in the know” or with cash to burn. Now it’s not like there’s been nothing going on: the most exciting shows of recent summers have been small, intimate community affairs under the sun or stars: Poor Pilgrim’s Island Show, Matt Dunn’s Drug Bike and our own, Wavelength-co-presented ALL CAPS! Outdoor Show — now rescheduled for Sept. 14 in the courtyard of the Music Gallery. The guerrilla-style Extermination Music Nights also loosely fit this category, even though most of them happen inside abandoned buildings. Half the fun is getting there, and finding the way into the "venue."

As wonderful as these events are, their limited size and resources means they have a big challenge reaching a wider public. Our big institutions, on the other hand, aren’t exactly pulling their weight. I’d say they’re letting the people of this city down big time — with one shining exception: Harbourfront Centre. With its huge, federally funded budget, Harbourfront is the envy of every other concert presenter in town. But Alok Sharma and the programming team put that money to good use, bringing in big international names like Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mulatu Astatqe and Ladytron to perform free concerts at their mainstage, while also making room for beloved locals like Woodhands, Katie Stelmanis and Toca Loca. Perhaps more importantly, HF attempts to reflect Toronto’s multi-culturalism through themed weekends that highlight a particular world region’s traditions.

Yet despite its waterfront setting, Harbourfront’s concrete-heavy environment isn’t exactly a comfortable place to lounge. I have yet to attend one of the large rock festivals on the Island, such as Vfest or the annual Arts & Crafts extravaganza, but all reports point to them being massive no-fun fests, more about line-ups for beer than line-ups of bands — and blame for that must fall with our paternalistic provincial booze police, the AGCO, not the promoters. Toronto is a city renowned for its parks and ravines. It blows my mind that no one has figured out how to program a concert series in High Park (a large west-end park, still only half the size of Central Park) — CanStage could easily find more uses for their Dream Stage than Shakespeare. The AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) could have included the building of a stage in Grange Park — immediately behind its property — as part of its renovation plans. And there are beautiful ravine parks like Morningside Park, in Scarborough’s Highland Creek area, that could encourage downtown music lovers to come explore the wilds of suburbia.

 
Rather than continuing to bitch about Toronto’s lack of vision in a rather un-Torontopian fashion, I’m going to take a couple of trips. The first of the aforementioned municipalities that I visited during the month of August is located a mere two and a half hours northwest of the city. Meaford, Ontario is an adorable town of 10,000 on the sandy shores of Georgian Bay, source of some of the most refreshing freshwater in the country. Kim Mitchell and the Cowboy Junkies recently played there to mark the centennial of the Meaford Hall performance venue. But an arguably more auspicious event took place the first weekend of August, just a few miles south of the town, on a property known as the “Funny Farm.” Electric Eclectics is the brain-child of artist power-couple Gordon Monahan and Laura Kikauka, former residents of both Toronto and Berlin who purchased this gorgeous farm property a few years back. Now in its third year, the festival is remarkable for the top-notch international talent from the experimental music/sound art world that gather to perform in this rural Ontario setting. On the day that my lady and I made the trek — the second of three days of festivities — the schedule included visitors from Berlin, Stockholm, Brooklyn, and Buffalo. A respectable amount of Toronto talent is represented, as the programmers have made the effort to reach out to the downtown noise and improv scenes.

Musical highlights at EE were as follows: Dorit Chrysler, a female thereminist and vocalist originally from Austria and now residing in New York, stunned in her gold dress as she pulled eerie, pretty pop melodies out of literal thin air, while making surprise references to Snoop Dogg. Berliner and Einsturzende Neubauten bassist Alexander Hacke switched to guitar for a set of ragged psycho-billy alongside vocalist and Love Parade co-founder Danielle de Picciotto. Minimalist pioneer Tony Conrad broke half the strings of his violin during a sturm und drang improv set with old pal Larry 7. And the revelation of the night: Brooklyn duo Loud Objects, who wielded soldering irons for a surprisingly danceable set of live circuit bending.

But in many ways the music took a back-seat to just being there. The Funny Farm doubles as a camp-site, giving the urban sound adventurer a chance to unpack the tent and commune with nature. Tony Conrad’s drone music takes on a fearsome new power while lying on your back on the grass and gazing at nearby stars and planets. The social dimension of the festival is also rewarding: with everything from a chip truck to a yard sale to sound installations to hula hoops to engage or distract you, it beomes incredibly easy to make friends here. And then there is Gordon and Laura’s studio, a feast for the eyes that takes living-space envy to artistic new heights. On top of it all, the festival is incredibly affordable: a full weekend pass went for only $60 this year, and that included camping privilege.

How do they do it? An Ontario Trillium Foundation grant explains the international travel and pro staging, but there’s a more important factor at work: Gordon and Laura are just incredibly well-connected. Many of the groundbreaking artists from overseas that come to the Funny Farm every year just happen to be their friends. Now don’t start moaning that “it’s all who you know.” These two have done the work and put in the time — as artists — to make people want to know them.

Bucolic splendour is the last thing anyone associates with New York City, but this city of 7 million people located 10 hours southeast of Toronto rivals Meaford for outdoor music supremacy. The past few summers, in fact, have seen an insane array of outdoor concert activity in the five boroughs, in a wide range of public spaces. Central Park and its SummerStage is probably the best known of these free outdoor summer series, and during my recent visit to New York, I was lucky enough to get to check out the triple bill of NYC avant-rock contenders Battles, Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance. All three have played Toronto, but given my general aversion to Lee’s Palace sized shows, I had never seen any of them before. GGD were disappointingly hippie-dippie, with a meandering sound that was more ‘80s “world-beat” than psychedelic. Black Dice, with their mix of electronic noise and beats, were surprisingly more enjoyable; perhaps it was the contrast of their sonic harshness with the verdant surroundings that blissed me out. The SummerStage stage is rather grand and stadium-like — even though the audience area is smaller and blessed with better sightlines than you’d expect —and Battles took on a stadium-rock-band presence at this show. That didn’t really gel with the nerdiness of their approach, though, all virtuosity and repetition. Mirrored is an amazing album, but it’s the obsessive focus and precision of its musicianship that makes it work. Something got lost that afternoon, and I found myself focusing more on the ridiculous height of their guitar straps and cymbal stands. Still, given it was a free show, I really couldn’t complain.

And that was just one of several dozen free shows at SummerStage’s 2008 season. Others included Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Taj Mahal, Seun Kuti, and Vampire Weekend — with our own Born Ruffians opening. And Central Park is by no means the only New York public space making itself available for the music and the people in the summertime. There’s also the Seaport Music Festival on Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport historical district (Wire, No Age, Dirty Projectors, Oneida); Celebrate Brooklyn at the bandshell in Prospect Park (Philip Glass, Deerhoof, Salif Keita, the late Isaac Hayes); and the River to River Festival at multiple waterfront venues (Sonic Youth at Battery Park, Akron/Family at 1812-era fort Castle Clinton, Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid in the courtyard of the World Financial Center). Drooling yet, Toronto?

How do they do it? These series do receive some public funding, but they primarily rely on corporate sponsorship: Snapple is the lead sponsor of SummerStage; for River to River, it’s American Express; for Celebrate Brooklyn, Starbucks. The signage at SummerStage was surprisingly low-key and unobtrusive, compared to our in-your-face sponsorship experience up here in Canada. That’s not the route that everyone wants to go, or even can go, however. On the smaller, more grassroots side, there’s the publicly funded non-profit, the East River Music Project, who have been presenting noise/experimental shows in East River Park for the last six years. Up in Queens, P.S.1, the contemporary art gallery located in a former public school, hosts the weekly Warm Up parties on Saturdays in its front courtyard — their musical line-ups are impressively varied: tonight (Aug. 30) lucky NYC visitors can check out no wave originals James Chance & the Contortions alongside minimal techno’s new poster boy, Matthew Dear. BTW, P.S.1's current exhibition of Finnish art, Arctic Hysteria, blew my mind — especially the deeply dark and disturbing installation piece, Kursk, by Markus Copper, inspired by the 2000 sinking of the Russian submarine of the same name.

My friend Emily tipped me off to the most bizarre outdoor concert location of all though: McCarren Park Pool is a former community pool, now drained of H2O and instead filled with 5,000 Williamsburg and Greenpoint hipsters on a regular basis. There have been regular ticketed concerts here for the last three summers, and free parties with live music every Sunday, hosted by Jelly NYC. The Jelly pool parties are as much about people-watching as the music, with a slip’n’slide on one side of the enormous stage, and a dodgeball court on the other. The bands the afternoon I went weren’t incredibly exciting — indie rapper Aesop Rock, Cuban funksters Chin Chin and local indie-rockers Panther, who did a pretty good cover of Can’s “Vitamin C” — but this summer’s Sundays have included the Hold Steady, the Breeders, Liars and Yo La Tengo.

The pool has an interesting history, too. Opened in the ‘30s as a New Deal gift to the public, the 6800-swimmer-capacity pool fell into disrepair and began attracting a sketchy element by the ‘70s. Closed in 1983 and all but forgotten for two decades, McCarren was brought back to life by the unexpected joint efforts of Noémie Lafrance, a choreographer and dance presenter, and Live Nation — yes, the huge corporate concert promoters — who collectively sank a quarter of a million into  converting the pool into a performance space. This was only in 2005, and it turns out 2008 was the last summer of partying in the pool. The City has plans to renovate and refill McCarren and thus reinstate its original function, starting next summer.

I would be remiss in reporting on my visit to New York if I didn’t talk up the last of the great outdoor shows I caught there. Lincoln Center Out of Doors is the venerable performing arts venue’s answer to the frenzy of fresh-air concerts, and they take place in the center’s Damrosch Park, which is more of a seated atrium than a park. On Aug. 20, New Jersey’s awesome and influential free-form radio station WFMU teamed up with Lincoln Center to present an incredible free evening of pan-African music. First up were Extra Golden, a promising collaboration between ex-D.C. hardcore guys and Kenyan benga players, but the combination didn’t really add up to much — it just sounded like straight-ahead benga. Next up were Either/Orchestra, backing up Ethiopian vocal legends Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete. At first, the set didn’t seem to be going too well. The Boston band is generally a too reined in with their jazz chops — they don't swing hard enough. And Alemayehu himself was surprisingly low-key; waving to the crowd but not putting much effort into it. But then Mahmoud Ahmed came up and rocked the place apart. He sprayed vocal firepower on every number, led the crowd in ecstatic clap-alongs, and looked magnificent in his white robes. Encore was "Ere Mela Mela," such an incredible song.

And the final group of the night — Dutch avant-punk institution The Ex with guest Getatchew Mekuria, a septuagenarian saxophonist from Ethiopia — is one of the best examples of cultural "fusion" I have ever seen or heard. Even when they're playing in a different style like Ethio-jazz, The Ex always sound like themselves. It doesn't sound like they're imitating the style, they're playing within it, but in their own particular way. The dissonance (to our ears) of the scales the Ethiopian players use is a really good fit for the clangy, minimal guitar style. Getatchew was indeed quite regal in his lionized regalia, and he and the entire horn section — including Toronto boy Brodie West — blew off everyone's faces. They had a male Ethiopian dancer who came up and did a crazy shoulder dance for a few songs — and at one point he pulled out a gigantic fucking knife, which kind of freaked people out a bit. I was relieved he didn't get rushed by security, who were being rather uptight about people standing up and dancing in the aisles.

My hero, though, as always, was drummer Katherina Ex, who was a total powerhouse as usual, but also sang a couple of songs when Getatchew left the stage — and she sang them in Amharic, with a perfect accent! Amazing. The show attracted a substantial East African crowd, and one of the sweetest moment of the show was hearing a lady next to me singing along with one of the traditional melodies emanating from Getatchew's saxophone.

I couldn’t help but think about what special space this amazing musical collaboration should perform in if they ever make their way to Toronto. Suggestions, anyone?

— Jonny Dovercourt