Where have all the festivals gone? For the past six years, the arrival of the Field Trip festival at Fort York on the first weekend in June has signalled the de facto beginning of the outdoor-concert season in Toronto. Not so in 2019, as the event’s creators and curators at local indie label Arts & Crafts surprised many Toronto music fans earlier this year with the announcement that Field Trip would be sitting this year out with the intention of returning in 2020 “after a little bit of time to let the grass grow back.” This was a dismaying turn of events, since Field Trip — whose creators have declined further comment on their future plans — drew crowds last year on par with its peak 2017 outing. Over two days, crowned by boffo headlining sets from Metric and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Field Trip 2018 appeared on solid footing as essentially the last multi-day, multi-genre festival of its kind left standing in the Toronto area after the dizzying boom-and-bust that saw such big-ticket events as WayHome, Riot Fest, Bestival and the Toronto Urban Roots Festival flee the market as quickly as they stormed in en masse just a few years ago. True, smaller-scale offerings such as Camp Wavelength, Venus Fest, Crystal Lake Sound, Electric Eclectics and the Harvest Festival abound in the margins, and the comparatively massive North by Northeast returns on June 7, but even that venerable brand was forced to beat a retreat to its club-hopping roots last year after gambling unsuccessfully on establishing itself as a ticketed weekend event in the Port Lands in 2016 and 2017. The major players left now are genre-specific festivals such as the Toronto Jazz Festival, EDM extravaganza Veld Music Fest and the long-running country camp-out Boots & Hearts at Burl’s Creek in Oro-Medonte, while the startup Roxodus Music Fest set to debut in Clearview Township on July 11 to 14 is hoping to draw an older classic-rock demographic to cottage country ...
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