THE MUSIC LIVES HERE
2012 a banner year for Toronto gig-goers, thanks to a growing number of great live venues,
Shows? Yeah, we got ’em.
As the curtains begin to draw closed on 2012, the avid Toronto concertgoer could be excused for feeling a little wrung out. It really didn’t let up this year.
This city’s concert calendar used to wax and wane, staging its all-out assaults on the clubs in the spring and the fall and concentrating the lion’s share of its big-ticket arena and amphitheatre spectacles in the warm summer months. If you’ve talked to anyone whose living hinges upon keeping pace with the touring traffic, however, chances are you heard them moan about how busy they’ve been.
And they have been busy: the pedal basically went to the floor in mid-January and has stayed there until now, as the holidays and what might be the only real annual slowdown left in the live-music business finally approach. It’s only now that anyone’s really got a moment to breathe and take stock of what’s going on.
To the most casual observer, a quick glance at the everexpanding pages of concert listings in the local weeklies or the Sophie’s Choice- esque array of options displayed on any given day by websites like JustShows.com or ConcertsTO.com suggests an endless embarrassment of riches on the show front. I just dialed up a random date, Dec. 11, and found five hot shows on the night: of-the-moment Vancouver duo Japandroids at the Phoenix, West Coast drone fiends Pink Mountaintops at the Garrison, the Faint doing Danse Macabreat Sound Acade- my, Brooklyn electro-pop hipsters St. Lucia at the Drake and Finnish metallers Sonata Arctica at the Opera House. Not an unusual pop bounty for a single evening, not even for a Tuesday evening.
“It’s kinda like everything in this city. The city’s growing so fast and changing so much, and the live business is just growing with the city,” opines Adam Gill, head of local promotion outfit Embrace Productions.
“With the Internet, it can get pretty niche-y. You can get 2,500 people out who are very passionate about something that most people may not have heard of. The live business probably has never been healthier across the board.”
The times have indeed been good to Embrace. Since sagely positioning itself several years ago as Toronto’s go-to promoter for au courant electronic acts — from a purely local perspective, Embrace got on the floor with the likes of Azari & III, Austra, Diamond Rings and Zed’s Dead early in the game — slightly before the current North American EDM boom, the company has aggressively expanded its reach in the local market to such a point that it’s recently been able to acquire two long-neglected spaces, the oblong Bathurst Street nightspot now known as the Hoxton and the venerable Danforth Music Hall, and relaunch them as vital live-music destinations.
The Music Hall — which, as Gill puts it, “was basically just sitting there” despite its past glories as a live venue — has, in particular, undergone a striking rebirth. In addition to its cosmetic touch-ups, an extra bar where the projection booth used to be and a boffo new sound system, the 92-year-old theatre was refurbished this past summer with removable seats that now allow it to flit between identities as an 1,100-capacity “soft seater” and the 1,500-capacity standing concert hall with immaculate sightlines Toronto has long wished it had.
“We always felt this venue was underutilized in the past. Given its convenient location, amazing acoustics and rich Toronto history, we knew this could be a terrific livemusic destination,” says general manager Michael Sherman, who’s loath to divulge how much of an investment transformed the Music Hall into such a thing once again, beyond saying “it has taken a considerable amount of time, effort and money.”
These are, as we’re told, “recessionary” times, so it says a lot that people are willing to put themselves on the line to expand upon a robust live-music market that already has, if a 2011 study by the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute’s figures are on the money, about 150 venues at its disposal.
This past year has witnessed the opening of band-friendly haunts 3030 in the Junction and Polyhaus on Carlaw Ave., while the gentrifying Dundas St. strip west of Bathurst currently awaits the arrival (once the usual, NIMBY-esque objections from homeowners in the vicinity are placated) of an easterly cousin to Dundas-and-Ossington live spots the Garrison and the Dakota Tavern in the form of restaurant/live-music spot/recording studio Studio Bar.
Queen West’s underused, 123year-old Great Hall, meanwhile, has this year — under the ongoing part-stewardship of Wrongbar owner Nav Sangha — definitively asserted itself as the choice concert destination everyone wanted it to become.
“The Great Hall is a really important project to me,” says Sangha, “because it’s kind of been an unpolished gem sitting in the centre of all of this amazing activity in the west end of the city. I’d gone to many shows and events there over the years, but it was very unrealized as far as being the community hub it has the potential to be.”
The growth of Toronto’s live-music market has been steady at the highest levels. Riley O’Connor, chairman of Live Nation Canada, has been able to report nothing but expansion for the past three years, even as his U.S. counterparts feel the sting of the ongoing downturn in North America’s economic fortunes. Indeed, while Live Nation’s operations in the States were coming out of a wobbly four quarters at the end of 2011, the Canadian office — hot off a 20,000-strong sellout for Deadmau5’s homecoming at the Rogers Centre last December — was proudly announcing the establishment of its EDM-focused Electronic Nation division, which went on to draw crowds in the tens of thousands for its start-up Digital Dreams and IDentity festivals last summer.
“Our secret,” says O’Connor, “is the fact that Toronto has been expanding, population-wise, for the past 10 years. We’ve been building beyond anything you see in any other city . . . The economic vitality of this market is remarkable.”
The diversity of Toronto’s exponentially expanding population is also key. Forget the distance between such internationally recognized Toronto exports as, say, Drake and Feist and F---ed Up and Deadmau5; there’s an entire, ethno-specific, multicultural underground most of us haven’t a clue about.
“Nashville can make lots of claims about being Music City, but we all know what that music is,” notes Music Canada president Graham Henderson. “In Toronto, it means something very different. If you say Toronto is ‘my music city,’ it can be anything to anybody.”
Without trying, Toronto has organically evolved into the thirdlargest music market in North America. It’s not surprising, then, that the music-industry lobby group Music Canada — which has scrambled since the 21st-century collapse in record sales to find more reliable revenue streams for working Canadian musicians — is trying to sell City Hall and the province of Ontario on marketing Toronto as a “music-tourism” destination.
Early this year Music Canada presented a report to the city urging it to exploit its internationally recognized pop-music industry in the way that Austin, Texas — where half of every dollar spent on tourism can be traced to its municipally nurtured “Live Music Capital of the World” reputation — does.
This city of ours has decisively risen to the level of a London or a New York or a Los Angeles in its capability to produce, break and consume musical talent over the past decade, and storied venues such as the Horseshoe Tavern and El Mocambo have enough history to merit, as Henderson points out, a “blue plaque” or two out front touting their significance.
For now, as veteran booking agent Ralph James puts it: “There doesn’t seem to be any sign of it letting up. At a certain point, the traffic will exceed the demand, I suppose. But my wife doesn’t go out to shows that much and she went and saw Melissa Etheridge the other night only to find out that Annie Lennox was at Roy Thomson Hall while she was at Massey Hall.” He notes that acts can sell out with out being broadly promoted, so “big shows come (and) you just don’t know about (them).” With heavy volume comes heavy competition and heavy expectations, too. Although the trend is by no means specific to this city, indie promoter Amy Hersenhoren, part of the Collective Concerts crew, has noticed a lot more unproved acts coming to Toronto anticipating bigger crowds and bigger paydays since the collapse of the traditional major-label recording industry put everyone on the road, all the time. “I think there is a ceiling,” she says. “While I would much rather be doing this in Toronto than, let’s say, in Montreal or Vancouver, where the ceiling seems to be much lower, I find if you come back more than once in a year Toronto audiences don’t like that, unless it’s something that’s really hot.” Toronto has a few standards, then. As expat promoter Elliott Lefko, now in Los Angeles working with Goldenvoice, points out, the city’s never been hurting on the live front. “I found this book at a garage sale called Impresario, by the legendary concert promoter Sol Hurok, who used to promote Isadora Duncan and the Monte Carlo Russian Ballet. He’s telling all these stories about promoting classical music and ballet and all this stuff, and his three big cities were New York, San Francisco and Toronto — and that was in the ’30s. And I don’t think anything’s changed since then.”