Looking down Jeanne-Mance from Sherbrooke. That distant point of light is the stage.

Last week, some guy came to town and performed a free concert. Most of the people who attended couldn't see him, which I suppose is somewhat ironic because the performer in question was Stevie Wonder.

A giant screen near Clark Street was a couple of blocks away from the stage, but still part of the concert.

Fans at the Place des Arts plaza watch Stevie Wonder on two big screens, their view of the stage blocked by a building.

Organizers, to their credit, planned for the fact that there was no way they could fit 200,000 people into the new Place du Festival or whatever they call it across the street from Place des Arts. So they setup a bunch of giant screens at key locations in the surrounding areas. The crowd stretched from Bleury to St. Laurent, from Sherbrooke to below Ste. Catherine.

The crowds were so huge, people were literally climbing over each other just to get a view of one of those screens.

Fans sit on a ledge at Place des Arts to watch Stevie Wonder on a giant screen.

Giant screens come with giant projectors

Others weren't so impressed:

Some bozo plays with his cellphone instead of watching the concert

Though in his defence, he did blame the faulty screen:

Stevie looks a bit greener than normal due to a malfunctioning projector at Ste. Catherine and Jeanne-Mance

There were also some cute touches:

Stevie Wonder's image is projected on a building next to his concert.

Another projection, this time on the Hyatt

But the crowds kept growing, and that's where organization started to fall out the window. It wasn't quite the "EPIC FAIL" some blowhards made it out to be, but there were some significant issues that didn't seem to be handled in any sensical manner.

Police tape between two vans provides for rather flimsy crowd management

Sherbrooke Street quickly became obstructed with people trying to get down Jeanne-Mance to watch the show. Police had to improvise to clear a path for emergency use, because the crowd's density would have made emergencies very dangerous.

But the bigger problem was on the west side. For some reason that was never made clear, nobody was allowed in via Bleury St. (which is where the only open exit to the Place des Arts metro station is). Those who could get close enough to the barriers to hear the security guys clearly were told to enter via Sherbrooke or René-Lévesque, requiring detours of between 400 and 700 metres, where they'd run into shady characters like these guys:

Capitalizing vendors sell Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson T-shirts just outside the Jazz Fest zone

Some decided not to make the trek and were left enjoying this view of the concert:

From a guarded barrier at de Maisonneuve and Bleury, you can barely make out a screen showing Stevie Wonder's face.

What got me was a few things: there weren't any signs directing people where to go, the security guards seemed not to know why they weren't letting anyone in, leaving thousands of people confused (and potentially disappointed thinking they wouldn't be able to get in anywhere).

A barrier at Ste. Catherine and Bleury allows people out but not in.

But mostly that on the other side of the barrier was this:

Sorry, we're full?

If there was a good reason to keep a few dozen people from entering the Jazz Festival from here, it wasn't apparent to me.

Even firefighters had to enjoy the concert from outside the barrier.

Photo JPL has a cool 360 panorama of the concert next to the actual stage.

Where do you hold a concert for 200,000?

The usual crowd-control screwups aside (this was, after all, a special occasion, and those are bound to happen), the event showed most clearly that the brand new addition to the Quartier des Spectacles is far too small to contain the kind of mega crowd someone like Stevie Wonder will attract. Yeah, people can watch the concert on giant screens elsewhere, but what's the point of going to a live concert if you're just watching it on TV when you get there?

Montreal has a strange problem with finding the right location for popular events. Our largest stadium sits unused by any of our three major sports teams (if you count the CFL and USL as major leagues). Instead, Olympic Stadium sits empty for all but a few special occasions like a CFL playoff game or a monster truck rally.

The Bell Centre, meanwhile, seats a third of the people of the Big O but routinely sells out. Getting tickets to Habs games is incredibly difficult, and getting tickets to major rock concerts incredibly expensive.

All of that is irrelevant to my question though, as the Stevie Wonder crowd would have required more than three Olympic Stadiums.

So where do you hold a crowd of 200,000 for an event in Montreal? Maisonneuve Park? Mount Royal Park? Turcot Yards?

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This week Jeff Heinrich, who just recently left the city department and moved into features (a.k.a. arts and life) wrote a not-so-nice review of Maria Schneider. The post has been "burning up the web" (and Twitter), leading to a staggering 56 103 comments so far, every single one of them insulting.

I'm left wondering: is it really that bad? Is Heinrich's descriptions of "irritatingly stiff body-language" or "middle-aged women in the audience" really sexist and ill-informed? Or are these commenters (most of whom, to their credit, use what appear to be their full names) just a bunch of people who disagree with a bad review (and never saw the long feature piece previewing the show, because they're Maria Schneider fans who were pointed to the post, not Gazette readers who came across it on their own)?

And do you need a degree in musicology to review a jazz show?

Discuss.

UPDATE: As more and more bloggers are linking to the post, and more hate-filled comments come in accusing Heinrich of not being nice (including one apparently from Maria Schneider herself), the author responds in a comment, in which he explains that he's not a music critic and it wasn't a review:

Yesterday I started reading the dozens and dozens of comments on my post about Maria Schneider's concert. Now that the artist herself has weighed in – calling it "the sickest review I've ever read" – it's time I joined in. The list of accusations by the 80-odd readers so far is just too long to ignore: sexism, misogyny, obscenity, ageism, ignorance, distortion, incompetence, childishness, pettiness, arrogance, flippancy, inaccuracy, lack of respect, mindlessness, opportunism.

Let's get a few things straight.

1) I'm not a jazz critic. I'm not even covering this festival. I got a ticket at the last minute to see someone I'd never seen before, ended up not liking the show, and wrote 350 words about what bugged me. It was not a review. It was a short post about how I felt coming out of a concert.

2) If it had been a review, I'd have done what reviewers usually do: prepare for the show by listening to some of the artist's CDs, take notes about what I saw and heard, write about what was played and by whom, maybe put it all in its historical context, discuss the high and the low points of the concert. More about the music, less about the scene.

3) Posts on The Gazette's Words & Music blog are usually short and to the point. Usually they're reviews but not always. In this case, I was a male audience member struck by a female artist's body language and underwhelmed by her musical language. That's it – not criticism, just an impression – my own subjective impression.

4) By the virulence of people's response, and the attacks on me personally, it seems that based on this one short post a lot of you think you know who I am, that the unflattering way I described someone you care about somehow reveals something sordid about me.

5) How could it? All you learn about me from my post is that I once played clarinet in high school and have seen a Bertolucci movie I liked. That's called an anecdotal, first-person lead; it informs my opinion, that's all. If you want to connect the dots from there and try to armchair-psychoanalyse, go ahead, but the material you're working with is a bit thin, no?

6) I know what a jazz orchestra is. I've heard a few; some big (Artie Shaw's blasting out of my suitcase Victrola), some small (Gerry Mulligan giving birth and rebirth to the cool on CD), some unforgettable (Wynton Marsalis leading a bebop tutorial with the jazz orchestra live at Lincoln Center). But none of that means I have to like Maria Schneider, at least not the show she gave the other night at Place des Arts.

7) Blogs are dangerous ground, I know. You riff on something directly to the Web and it gets an immediate response. No filter, no editor, no backstop, no taste police. It's risky.

8) But the risk is the point, isn't it? Getting into an immediate back-and-forth with readers wasn't something that was possible in print journalism before, and that's a good and bad thing.

9) Good, because it makes journalists more accountable, more engaged with their readers, more approachable. Bad, because it sets up a relationship that can be very time-consuming – even more labour-intensive than gathering the news itself. More scurrilous, too, as I've learned this week.

10) Maybe non-specialists should be kept away from covering something as technical as jazz. It could make for better-informed journalism. On the other hand, iit could just make for more hermetic journalism, and that wouldn't be accomplishing much.

One final note, this one to Maria Schneider: I admire the fact you admit your show here last week wasn't the greatest, and I admire the fact you say you "can't begin to know" why I wrote about you the way I did.  That's more honest than a lot of people who think they do know, people whose idea of rebuttal is to be even more offensive than the thing they're criticizing. I suppose I asked for it, was naïve to think it wouldn't matter, didn't expect the backlash. Was I "sick" when I wrote my post? Not really – just not in the mood. Maybe next time.

- Jeff Heinrich

Not that I'm defending the review, but I always admire anyone who can generate so much irrational anger and hypocritical insult-filled hate from people simply by saying he disliked something.

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Final departures on the orange and green lines will be 1:05am instead of 12:35am, and final departures on the yellow line will be at 1:20am instead of 12:50am.

For those who haven't taken the last metro before, the last trains of the orange and green lines wait for each other at Berri-UQAM and Lionel-Groulx to make sure people transferring don't get stranded. The trains are scheduled so the last ones depart in all four directions from Berri-UQAM at 1:30am.

For those of you going to the concert, you'll want to be on the platform at Place des Arts at 1:15am if you're heading east, 1:25am if you're heading west. If you're taking the yellow line, try being there no later than 1am.

The STM also announced Monday a bunch of other stuff they're doing with summer festivals, although most of it is in the form of cross-promotional discounts or free shuttles.

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The blog reads like a diary, which got me thinking about mainstream media outlets and their use of these curious creatures they still don't quite understand. Some blogs make sense, like The Gazette's wildly successful and very high-quality Habs Inside/Out blog, which gives the paper's experienced hockey writers a place where they can share late-breaking behind-the-scenes rumours and other news directly with a niche audience.

Others, however, read more like personal blogs which catalog the hourly events of its authors but doesn't provide anything interesting to anyone outside the immediate family of the blogger.

It's not the fault of the bloggers, most of whom (including Hall) are very talented writers. The problem is a lack of direction from the media outlets that create them. They give them this platform, tell them to "go and blog" and don't give them much else to work with. The bloggers are left with nothing else to write about than their own personal stories, as mundane as they may be.

Blogs by beat writers is one thing. It's pretty clear what the blog is going to be about. But for anything beyond that, the media have to answer the question "what information would I go to this blog to learn?"

If the answer is "what someone did for a couple of weeks", then I think it needs some rethinking.

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