01 — So long, Marianne
Start where the city does: Leonard Cohen, born in Westmount in 1934, who left for New York and Hydra and Los Angeles and never really left at all. He kept a triplex facing Parc du Portugal off the Main, ate at the same bagel counters as everyone else, and came home for good in 2016 — buried with his family on the slope of Mont-Royal. The year after, the city painted him twenty-one storeys tall on Crescent Street, fedora and all, gazing across downtown. Walk almost anywhere in the centre and he is, quite literally, watching over you.
But the deeper root is jazz. Oscar Peterson was born in 1925 in Little Burgundy, the working-class neighbourhood along the canal where Black railway porters settled and the clubs stayed open until the musicians stopped. Duke Ellington called him “the Maharaja of the keyboard.” The scene he came from — Rockhead’s Paradise, house rent parties, church pianos — made Montréal the jazz capital of a very dry North America during Prohibition, and the habit stuck: the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal is still the largest jazz festival on Earth.
“I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations.”Leonard Cohen
02 — The loft years
Fast-forward to the 1990s, when the same cheap industrial lofts that gave Mile End its studios gave the city a second musical big bang. Godspeed You! Black Emperor formed in 1994, built the Hotel2Tango studio in a former warehouse, and founded Constellation Records — a label run with the discipline of a monastery and the volume of a freight train. Bran Van 3000’s “Drinking in L.A.” smuggled Montréal slack into every radio on the continent in 1997 — while on the francophone dial, Jean Leloup’s “1990” had already turned chaos into a genre of its own.
Then came the avalanche: Arcade Fire’s Funeral in 2004, recorded in that same loft economy, and by 2011 a Grammy for Album of the Year — a room of industry executives audibly asking “who is Arcade Fire?” while Montréal laughed. Spin and Pitchfork both crowned the city the centre of indie rock; Casa del Popolo, the little venue co-founded by Godspeed’s own bassist, is still the room where the next avalanche is probably sound-checking tonight.
03 — Le beat d’aujourd’hui
The current chapter is beat-driven and bilingual. Kaytranada, raised on the South Shore, won the Polaris Prize in 2016 for 99.9% and took home two Grammys in 2021 — the sound of Montréal house going global. Grimes wrote Visions in a Mile End loft on the Arbutus Records circuit. Charlotte Cardin swept the 2022 Junos; Hubert Lenoir scandalised and delighted the francophone establishment in the same week; Men I Trust and Half Moon Run fill theatres from Tokyo to Berlin with very different kinds of hush.
04 — Millions, dehors, gratuits
What makes Montréal singular isn’t just who it produces — it’s how it listens. Every summer the city closes its downtown and hands it to the crowds: the Festival International de Jazz, the largest jazz festival on the planet, pulls roughly two million festivaliers through hundreds of shows, most of them free and outdoors. Two weeks earlier, Les Francos de Montréal does the same for French-language music — the biggest francophone music event in the world — and by August, Osheaga fills Île Sainte-Hélène while Piknic Électronik runs every Sunday under Calder’s sculpture. In this town, “going to a show” is a civic activity, like shovelling snow.
And sometimes the machine produces a night that enters the annals. Three weeks before the offsite — June 27, 2026 — Angine de Poitrine, the polka-dot-hooded duo who played a 2,000-cap club at the same festival only a year earlier, drew an estimated 70,000 people to a free show on the Place des Festivals: the largest crowd since Stevie Wonder’s 200,000 in 2009, a night the festival itself filed alongside Ray Charles in 2003. The square was declared comble. The city shrugged, and started queuing for bagels.
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