About Me

A 20+ year veteran of the Toronto music community, Jonny Dovercourt (a.k.a. Jonathan Bunce) has been praised everywhere from City Hall to The New York Times for his contributions to the arts and culture in this city. Co-founder and Artistic/Executive Director of the groundbreaking non-profit organization and concert series Wavelength Music, Jonny has also worked for arts institutions including long-running new music space The Music Gallery, small-press stalwarts Coach House Books, and the Images Festival of experimental film and video. The author of the acclaimed book Any Night of the Week: A D.I.Y. History of Toronto Music 1957-2001 (Coach House Books, 2020), his writing has also appeared in Eye Weekly, the Huffington Post, Now Magazine, MusicWorks, Exclaim and CBCMusic.ca. In 2023, he co-authored the acclaimed report Reimagining Music Venues with Prof. Daniel Silver at the University of Toronto Department of Sociology. As a musician, he has performed as part of a dozen different ensembles, including The Hidden Cameras, Republic of Safety, and Several Futures, and performed across North America and Europe.

Any Night of the Week
A D.I️ .Y. History of Toronto Music (1957-2001)

“The impact of Toronto music is written into the city’s streets, its airwaves, and our consciousness. The city’s most successful musical artist of all time, Drake, was able to rename the town. The ‘6ix God’ was the first artist to create an identity around the city’s mythology, and export that into multinational success. That’s a big change from the icons of the sixties, who all had to flee the city and jump the U.S. border to make it big. This book is not their story. This is the story of those that didn’t ‘make it’ by the conventional music business definition of success. Instead, they collectively made something much more valuable: they built a community. This is the story of how Toronto did it ourselves.”

Part civic history and part memoir from this veteran scene-builder and co-founder of the acclaimed Wavelength concert series, Any Night of the Week charts the evolution of Toronto’s diverse independent music scene in the latter half of the twentieth century. From the Yorkville and Yonge Street scenes that spawned Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and The Band in the sixties, through to the hip-hop, indie rock, and electronica-laden nineties, which spawned acts like Broken Social Scene, Michie Mee, and Peaches, Dovercourt tells the story of how key venues, neighbourhoods, artists, and promoters laid the groundwork for this provincial outpost to grow into a music mecca. Unjustly forgotten or overlooked innovators, such as Syrinx, Martha & the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Phleg Camp, King Cobb Steelie, and Do Make Say Think are finally given the chance to tell their story in print.

Wavelength Music

Wavelength Music is a curated concert series and non-profit organization, which I co-founded in 2000 and have been leading as Artistic Director since 2014. Wavelength has presented over 750 shows in our 20 year history, from pivotal early gigs by Toronto indie royalty in our early days, to our current year-round slate of festivals, concerts, and educational programming. Learn more at our website, wavelengthmusic.ca