It is, very much so. The closest I can come, in terms of other festivals, is Progday - not this year's version, but most years'. The ones where a certain proportion of the bands are total or near-total unknowns from up and down the East Coast, and they turn out to be fantastic. Same thing with Seattle - it's a great music town above and beyond its punk/grunge reputation, with an excellent public-school music program, fine jazz programs out of both Cornish and UW, and a large enough hip and open-minded audience to support a small but good experimental-music scene. A whole lot of the Downtown NYC players come from there, and have for years.
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