NY summer music festivals that won’t break the bank

New York City is, in some ways, a pretty unpleasant place to be over the summer. The streets get so hot you can feel the heat through your shoes, the humidity makes your hair look as if you’ve been electrocuted, and an influx of European tourists crowd the streets and create endless lines in front of the Metrocard machines. But whenever summer in the city has you hating on New York, an abundance of free outdoor concerts can make you fall back in love again.

Central Park SummerStage is the most famous summer venue—and with good reason. For 20 years, this summer arts festival has been showcasing wide array of live performances, from dance shows to plays to concerts. And with fantastic musical acts performing for free outside in the park, it makes you wonder why you would ever pay to stand inside a stuffy club to hear music during the summer months.

This year’s festival kick-off concert with TV on the Radio and Dirty Projectors on June 5 is the only that requires tickets—the money from this show is meant to fund the rest of the season—and is unfortunately already sold out.

But if you’re willing to brave the sometimes shock-inducing lines and unpredictable weather, there are many more wonderful acts to be seen—if you can get in. Last summer’s highly anticipated M.I.A. concert was so created so much hype that thousands of people had to be turned away. Assuming you can make it through the gates, you can catch Explosions in the Sky, Matisyahu, Q-Tip, and M. Ward, among others, in the open air and free of charge.

Though SummerStage is the most famous of the summer music festivals, Prospect Park’s Celebrate Brooklyn! is the oldest. Maybe Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed both Prospect and Central parks way back when, had music in mind when he made these spaces so ideal for al fresco jamming. Prospect Park’s festival, like Central Park’s, features a blend of dance, theater, spoken word, film, and music, all under the park’s acoustic arc bandshell.

The story of Celebrate Brooklyn! is very much the story of Brooklyn’s renaissance. Started in 1979, the festival was created to draw people to Brooklyn and to make the borough a cultural institution. With the subsequent popularity of the festival’s programming came money to refurbish the beautiful but neglected Prospect Park.

Now that Brooklyn has reached a peak of cultural relevancy, Celebrate Brooklyn’s music lineup is looking appropriately exciting. On June 8, David Byrne will open the festival, and the rest of the summer lineup includes everything from jazz to bluegrass to klezmer. There is a suggested donation of $3—less than the price of a latte—but if you really can’t pay, you won’t be turned away.

Further proving Brooklyn’s hold on the arts, a brand new music venue will premiere this summer in Williamsburg. The famed and fabulous McCarren Park Pool parties, some of the city’s most popular outdoor concerts, have been moved to a new space on the Williamsburg waterfront, since, strangely, the pool will now actually be used for swimming.

The Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn, which organized last year’s concerts, has not announced the full list of performers for this summer’s series, but if last year’s shows are any indication, the bar is pretty high. Everyone from Gogol Bordello to Wilco made it to the pool last summer, and this year the alliance is hoping to add classical and opera concerts to the mix. The only confirmed act so far is a Simian Mobile Disco DJ set on August 9th.

And for those times when you need some serious Woody Allen-esque New York romanticism, there is no better remedy than the outdoor concerts at South Street Seaport.

This year’s schedule is not yet up on the Seaport’s Web site, but blogs have been buzzing with word that bands such as Black Moth Super Rainbow and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have been confirmed.

Sure, the place is totally kitschy, filled with stores like Bath and Body Works in “ye olde” buildings, but when your favorite band is playing, most of the audience is stoned, and the masts of the port’s historic ships are glowing in the stage lights, you realize why there are so many songs written about this city.

For all the frustrations the urban heat can bring, there’s a reason all those families in ’50s movies flee the city in the summer. There is something so magical about a bunch of urbane New Yorkers gathered outside to listen to music—it can make anyone forget, for just a few hours, that there is no air conditioning.

Tags: Arts & Entertainment, Rebecca Pattiz, David Xu