Believe it or not, Toronto is the third largest live-music market in North America. But why shouldn’t we believe it? Like our sprawling cityscape, Toronto’s music scene is considerably polycentric, and as such we appear to be the only major music city lacking a significant multi-day music festival that brings the city together. Austin’s got SXSW and ACL, LA’s got Coachella, New York’s got Governor’s Ball, and Montreal has Osheaga, and so on. Fine, we have NXNE, but surely we’ve got more in us than an Austin rip-off. Where’s our multi-day, locally run/represented music fest? That’s where TURF comes in. Here’s what TURF did to set themselves apart from Field Trip, ALL CAPS!, Digital Dreams, and Virgin Fest to ensure their piece in Toronto festival lore, and why we’re excited that this festival is calling Toronto home.
1) It’s actually in, and from Toronto:
The Toronto Urban Roots Festival (TURF) is hitting Fort York’s Garrison Common this week for a multi-day festival that represents our city, while actually taking place within our city (sorry Downsview). The festival was established by Toronto’s very own Jeff Cohen, owner of both the Horseshoe Tavern and Lee’s Palace, two of the city’s most famous hubs for live music. According to Cohen, “TURF is the evolution of all these little glimpses you’re seeing of outdoor live music shows in Toronto.” It’s also the solution to the Torontonian complex of abandoning our home base for music festivals. “If you grow up here, you’re used to going somewhere else; you either go to the States, to Europe, to Barrie, or even up to Downsview, but you’re not going to Toronto,” Cohen explains. Taking his favorite bits and pieces from Toronto’s single-day Field Trip extravaganza which happened earlier this summer (also at Fort York, which is now holding down the fort for Canadian shows), and NXNE’s big-brother SXSW in Austin, Cohen is working to combine the best from the fests around the world, and work them into something entirely new and Canadian.
Stars perform earlier this summer at Arts & Craft’s single-day extravaganza Field Trip
2) It puts emphasis on the international without sacrificing the local:
This isn’t exactly the first big music fest to come to Toronto. Many of you may remember Virgin Fest — a festival that ran in Toronto from 2006 — 2009. In addition to being a financial failure for Virgin, the festival was deemed a cultural failure for Toronto. The festival drew a pretty impressive line-up of international bands, though it hardly had any commitment to Torontonian, or even Canadian content. With the exception of the Canuck-packed 2007 line-up (which had Metric, Stars, and Tokyo Police Club back-to-back) this festival could have taken place anywhere else in the world, and had no connection to the city it was in. In fact, Cohen tells us it even hurt the city: “Virgin Fest came and went, and people weren’t all that happy with it. There was lots of corporate signage everywhere, and it kind of bankrupted local promoters. Didn’t end up very well.” TURF, on the other hand, appears to have figured out the balance of the Canadian/International music fest which much more success. Everything from their list of food vendors (Big Fat Burrito, Caplansky’s, etc.) to their line-up (oh right, there’s music too!) screams Canada, while still managing to carve out a little space for our neighbours to the south, and overseas. The international exposure hasn’t gone unnoticed, with 5% of the ticket sales coming from the US.
3) It’s coming at just the right time:
There may very well be a number of reasons why something like TURF never came along until now, ranging from the province’s “archaic” liquor laws to a municipal government that, in Cohen’s words, “bowed to its resident associations – which are very powerful – and the basically allowed these associations to chase live music events out of the area.”
Torontonians can be too quick to declare our city as an un-fun zone. Fine, I get it – this is, after all, the city that decided this week to crack down on a beer in the park, and where the subway closes before the bars do. Despite all of this, Toronto manages to be a pretty damn fun place, and our liquor laws have evolved to prove as much. Cohen praises the “evolution” of our province’s liquor laws, citing “the feds, the province, and the city made things difficult. They had archaic liquor laws that made for an un-fun zone… [in which] people used to be caged up in beer tents because of Ontario liquor laws, and now those laws have evolved, so people can get a drink and walk around [the venue] with it.” If anything, Cohen has been blown away by the government’s assistance with the project, claiming that he “was actually surprised about how few roadblocks we had to face. I thought the local city councillor Mike Layton was going to have a shit-fit, and that the local resident associations and condo associations would get together and complain a bunch. I haven’t heard a word from any of them. In fact, the city councillor has been very supportive through the whole thing.” If there’s anything in the way of TURF being a major success, it’s no longer governmental restrictions about noise, alcohol, or anything of the sort.
4) It won’t compromise the quality of its acts for commercial appeal:
The line-up will certainly please the city’s ‘Musoids,’ as Cohen calls them, even with its roster of non-mainstream acts. “This will never be about mainstream acts. Not interested. It’s not going to happen.” Cohen is deploying the same bold tactics with the festival that he used many years ago when taking over the Horseshoe. “When I came into The Horseshoe I had to keep changing up the music every couple of years, we couldn’t afford to get caught up in one genre. We’ve gone from country, to punk rock, to all ages appeal, and we keep re-inventing it, and now we’re bringing electric music into it.” While the festival won’t necessarily attract the same demographic as say, Electric Dreams, it does a nice job at stretching the limitations of Urban and Roots music to include acts far more diverse. Cohen says of the line-up that he’s “going to do something that’s not necessarily oriented to kids, but orientated to people of all ages. Our programming is a little more specific in appealing to those aged 30-50.” Cohen sees this target demographic not as a break with the average fest, but as a continuation with “the evolution that if you’re an adult you can have fun. So if you’re 35 or 40 and you’re a Musoid you can go to an outdoor event and have a great time.”
As exciting and promising as TURF seems to be, I can’t help but skip ahead to what TURF could be in a year or two. Cohen’s already planning ahead for next year, scheming, “maybe we can experiment a little more next year, maybe bring in three stages, maybe stretch the term ‘roots’ even more.”
The point isn’t to have a festival that’s exclusively Torontonian, nor is it to have something entirely international. The point of the multi-day fest is to combine the local, or national with international, without losing a sense of the former. Many are resistant to the Toronto’s new branding of Toronto as the new Austin. To them I say: Toronto is not, and will not ever be Austin – and that’s probably for the best. I say bringing a little bit of the international music scene in is alright, as long as it brings a little bit of the local music scene out, and no side is hurt in the exchange. There can be a middle ground between the claustrophobia of NXNE and the white-washing of Virgin Fest, and TURF set out to find just where that sweet spot is.
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Jeremy Schipper is an intern at Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @jeromeoschipps.
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