The NY Times ran a long and rather dumb article on Wednesday about the Montreal Jazz Festival, one of the largest events of its type on Earth. The feature’s writer loves the festival all right, but questions what the heck the culture of jazz music has to do with La Belle Provence.

I’ll tell you what. Quebec has long thought of itself as the bastion of European civilization in North America. Jazz, or rather certain flavors of classic and modern jazz, have long been commercially centered in Europe, particularly in France. You can hence think of the Montreal fest as a gift of the Francophone world, graciously giving a North American-invented genre back to us.

Also, a major feature of the festival is a nightly downtown street party with high-energy “world music” acts. I just saw one such performance tonight on the Francophone cable channel TV5. A big street party’s the sort of event everybody around the world can dig (they even had ’em at the Salt Lake Olympics). But in a city of hot passions and often cold weather, a summer night’s especially worthy of celebrating. And the Quebecois I saw did just that, splendidly.