Every band I saw this summer, part 1
From all over the world, in dozens of languages, all on one stretch of downtown Montréal
Until the mid-1950s, Montréal was the undisputed commercial centre of Canada. The country’s largest manufacturers, companies and banks were all headquartered here and significantly, in the western, English-speaking end of town. Even today, the east end of the island, which has historically been almost entirely French-speaking, remains visibly less developed than the west side. The tension between Anglophone commercial muscle in Montréal and Francophone political power throughout Québec is something Montréalers navigate on a daily basis and its fingerprints can be found just below the surface of many of the city’s most-beloved institutions.
Centred around the semi-pedestrianized rue Sainte-Catherine’s, Place des Arts began its life as part of the opera-loving Mayor Jean Drapeau’s mission to pull the downtown core further east and out of the Anglo west. Over the decades, the complex has grown to a sprawling collection of six full concert halls, lined with plazas and promenades well-loved by locals and visitors alike. Each summer, it plays host to multi-day festivals of both free and paid events. Three of them, les Francos de Montréal, Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, and Festival International Nuits d’Afrique, run, with just a few nights off between them, one after another from mid-June to mid-July. Every year, when the schedules come out, my friends pore over them, comparing notes across group chats about who they want to see, which nights work for them, and when is the earliest they can get downtown on a given night. As much as I love my friends, this turns the whole thing into homework and invariably leads to my checking out of the conversation and the festivals themselves. Instead, my strategy this year was to simply rock up to the festival grounds whenever I had a spare moment and to take in the festivals as they were at that moment. As it turns out, this was a great way to see more music than I ever had before as it removed the decision paralysis that these kinds of events can give the wayward music fan. Granted, for some of these artists I was only able to see a song or two as I stopped by on my way home from work or before the festival grounds were flooded by one of Montréal’s frequent summer storms. For others I was able to take in full sets of brand new sounds and genres. So to dive in and to give these artists their full due (and to celebrate the end of festival season) I’ll be sharing them with you over the next few weeks, along with my thoughts on their most recent full-length release. We’ll begin with two artists I saw on the same night at the Francos, Ariane Roy and Jupiter & Okwess.
Ariane Roy
Seen at: Les Francos de Montréal, June 13, 2026
Hometown: Québec City, Canada
Language: French
Most recent full-length release: Dogue, 2025
Ariane Roy’s Dogue is a house of voices. It is a record that wakes up idea by idea, sound by sound. That the kick drum that opens the record is insistent, mixed a little too loud for comfort, and has for a first partner Roy’s delicate, unadorned, first light through just-parted lashes voice tells the listener that most of these ideas will contradict their brothers and sisters. But the house stays standing, or rather, in one piece, as it is hard to say something as rollicking as Dogue is remotely stationary.
As delicate as it is, Roy’s voice emerges as the uniting tonic of the record, somewhere the dozens of instruments heard throughout can find safe landing. A perfect example is the transition from the deep-house gone Baroque of ‘I.W.Y.B.’ into the harp-driven fairy-tale of ‘Nocturne’. Both are songs sung towards a lover that is something between a wild beast to be tamed and a lingering infection that has nevertheless been ruthlessly cured. Through both, Roy’s sense of melody keeps holds more than the notes being sung but also a tenderness, a danger, and the savagery of introspection without losing the listener along the way.
Dogue is a dark, lithe album that takes great pleasure in surprising its listeners. Roy is already a star in the Québecois scene, having earned many accolades since her début in 2020 but this latest release is a departure from her earlier, folkier ventures, itself a surprise in her journey as an artist. If you had ever wished Florence + the Machine or Feist had worked with Nine Inch Nails, this is a record you will love.
Jupiter & Okwess
Seen at: Les Francos de Montréal, June 13, 2026
Hometown: Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Languages: Kimongo, Lingala, Swahili, French, Tetela, Ekonda, Tshiluba, German, Portuguese, Spanish and many, many others (250 according to this interview)
Most recent full-length release: Ekoya, 2025
While I did see great deal of music during the month of summer festivals in Montréal, I’ll confess to only have made it to one night of the Francos. I can only chalk it up to taking an extra few days to get my sea-legs. The night I did go, however, was a rather memorable night. Some friends of mine in the local salsa scene were heading downtown to one of outdoor dances that populate the summer calendar so I was already going to be in the area of Place des Arts. Before going to the salsa night, I changed trains for the Francos and caught Ariane Roy’s set. It was something of a crowning achievement for Roy, the mainstage at what is almost certainly the biggest Francophone festival in the world. Her performance perfectly matched the moment, being true to her music while also giving her fans a reason to smile. From there, I went to salsa and did my best not to step on anyone’s toes. But something strange and entirely predictable happened on the walk down rue Sainte-Catherine to the Village: spring became summer from one step to another.
As the salsa night wound down, I didn’t even try to convince any of my friends to head back to Place des Arts. It being summer, I was headed where my feet were taking me. Before long, I was back on the festival grounds just as Jupiter & Okwess were taking the stage.
Get AManNamedVenice’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Montréal’s name in the Kanien’kéha or Mohawk language is Tiohtià:ke which means “where the boats and rivers meet”. For millennia, this island was where the indigenous peoples of this part of the continent met to trade goods, news and cultures. The band I watched as spring turned to summer on this ancient meeting place is the band through which Jupiter Bokondji has made his way since 2013, though he has been working for much longer. Born in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bokondji has made a decades-long career out of bringing his music into communion with new cultures, voices, languages and genres. First in Berlin in the 1980s, as a young man where his father was a diplomat, then back home between the different tribes of the DRC, and now between nations and oceans, a cultural meeting place unto himself. Onstage, he is a commanding presence; muscular and light on his feet, easily whipping the crowd into polyrhythmic frenzy. I hardly had to remind myself to go and search up his music when I got home, I could still hear it when I woke up the next morning.
At first blush, it is hard to imagine a record as different from Ariane Roy’s Dogue as Ekoya. One is an intimate, dark, dance-influenced exploration of social wilderness, the other is an immediate, explosive festival going in a million different directions. The rhythmic shift in the opener ‘Selele’ is a great example of this. At the midpoint of the song, it sounds like only one of the drummers and the bassist got the memo on the time shift and the rest of the band is only happily following along. But listening again to that song, a common thread between the two records is obvious: the primacy of the human voice; that there is something being said here worth listening to. The song opens with a heavily filtered female voice like you would hear when someone calls in to a radio contest. She only begins singing when she’s said what she came here to say. Then a chorus of male voices rushes in underneath her, lifting her last lyrics high in the mix before Bokondji himself comes in, opening his throat wide to bring the song to a triumphant sprint.
Once the record lets us catch our breath, we arrive at the tender ‘Na Bado’ which means ‘and still’ in Swahili and the voices heard become one. Specifically, those of the voiceless:
Les invisibles aux yeux du monde, et pourtant bien cachés dans l’ombre.
Importants.
Chacun de nous vivra sa vie.
Une larme au coeur de l’océan.
Un grain de sable dans le vent.
Importants.
Roughly:
Those invisible to the eyes of the world, and even then well hidden in the shadows.
They are important.
Each of us will live our lives.
A tear in the middle of the ocean.
A grain of sand in the wind.
We are important.
The record picks up again into more familiar African rock and funk before coming to a soft landing but the message, delivered across dozens of languages, will find you exactly when it needs you to find it, whether you speak the language or not. Ekoya is a meeting place, it is a reminder, an opening and a closing. It is most of all a damned good record.
Ekoya is not on Bandcamp but here is an earlier release by Jupiter & Okwess:
