Montreal in Summer

The early summer twilight lingered until well past nine, and a full moon shone over Montréal. I got off the subway at the Pie IX stop, and walked east past the Botanical Gardens, past the strange suspended concrete clamshell of Olympic Stadium, towards Maisonneuve Park.

Je Me Souviens - I remember - is a most apt motto for Québecois license plates, because even in this relentlessly contemporary city most public nomenclature harks back to people and things of a distant past - the park to the city's founder, the 17th-century Sieur de Maisonneuve; the subway station and the boulevard it stands on to a pope, Pius the Ninth, who reigned a century and a half ago.

I was on my way to an annual revel born of pride and remembrance. It was June 24, the feast day of St. Jean Baptiste - John the Baptist - patron of the province. Born in the country parishes and secularized now as the National Festival of Québec, St. Jean Baptiste Day is celebrated nowhere so heartily as at this great gathering in Maisonneuve Park.

I was able to walk only so far into the park. After that, it was more a matter of slinking sideways as I found the points of least resistance in the ever-thickening crowd. The blue-and-white fleur-de-lis flag of Québec flew everywhere. People wore big flags as capes; they waved small ones in rhythm to a 10-piece band that powered out rock, reggae, Latin, funk, folk, and torch songs. The crowd seemed to know the words to the schmaltziest numbers, and they went wild when the lead singer yelled out Vive Québec Souverain - long live sovereign Québec - at the beginning of an acoustic ballad. But there was no cranky separatist edge to the party, and I never felt like I'd better keep my Anglo trap shut. It was just St. Jean Baptiste Day, and everybody was feeling ... well, sovereign. I felt pretty sovereign myself. It was the only time I've ever stood in a crowd of a quarter of a million people that was in anywhere near so good a mood, and it was contagious.

It never surprises me that things are different in Montréal. It isn't just the language and culture; Montréal is the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, but today it is a vortex of myriad ethnicities, and English is hardly uncommon. Montréal's apartness is physical, and for all its cosmopolitanism its special character is insular. The city is an island, croissant-shaped and 32 miles long (11 wide at the elbow of the croissant), wedged amidst the rapids of the St. Lawrence River. I have crossed the St. Lawrence bridges by car, by train, and - one cold rainy day - by bicycle, and each time the downtown towers and the steep wooded hump of Mt. Royal seem a world apart, and the sense of departure from a physical and figurative mainland seems most real. As in the United States, Canada's most alluring city is an island.

Montréal's greatest summer celebration is its Jazz Festival, held this year from June 26 through July 6. Now nearing its fourth decade and often cited as the most important event of its type in the world, the festival not only encompasses traditional jazz forms but "stretches the definitions to include blues, fusion jazz, and world music," says co-founder and artistic director André Menard. "We also present the European style of jazz, which is more chamber-like, more cerebral. Many of the Europeans wouldn't play at all in North America, if they didn't play here."

Visiting Montréal during the Jazz Festival, I was struck by how thoroughly the music and the festival spirit define the downtown atmosphere. This isn't one of those festivals that a big city absorbs and makes invisible, so that it is impossible to tell whether anything special is going on unless you buy tickets for an evening event at an indoor venue. There are plenty of top-drawer acts - this year's lineup includes Aretha Franklin, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Dianne Reeves, Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band, and the Blind Boys of Alabama - but there's also a virtually nonstop series of free outdoor performances on stages set up around the downtown hub of Complexe Desjardins and the Place des Arts. Local artists and out-of-towners - many only a year or two away from celebrity status at ticketed evening concerts - play for free at this great happy midway of jazz, where it's easy to stroll from one stage to another, perhaps stopping between sets for a glass of wine at one of the tents set up for the duration among downtown's spacious open plazas. "For Montréalers, the festival has made them tourists in their own city," says André Menard. "It gives soul to downtown Montréal. It transforms the way people see the city."

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On a hazy summer morning in Montréal, I took a three-mile tour around the world.