Bangkok’s Parks Are Once Again Offering the Cheapest Civilised Evening in Town

Bangkok, in one of its rarer acts of good breeding, is once again putting on free live music in the parks throughout April. Music in the Park returns to its usual green suspects — Lumphini, Benjakitti, Benchasiri, Rot Fai and a few other corners of the capital where people still briefly pretend this is a city designed for pleasure rather than survival.

The idea is refreshingly simple. Instead of paying several hundred baht to sit under industrial air-conditioning while a cover band assaults your dinner, you may spread yourself on actual grass and listen to jazz, classical music, pop or student bands as the evening cools by Bangkok standards, which is to say from punishing to merely sticky. There are appearances from the Bangkok Big Band, the Bangkok Metropolitan Orchestra and a rotating cast of newer acts from the Talent Everywhere project.

The schedule is broad enough to reward minimal planning, which suits this city perfectly. On 1 April, TEE JETS opens at Lumphini Hall. The first weekend brings trumpet and piano at Lumphini, indie sets at Benchasiri and Benjakitti, and a healthy amount of jazz the following evening. Mid-month the programme wanders to Rot Fai Park and Rama VIII Bridge Park before finishing with more young bands at Benjakitti and Vachirabenjatas.

For expats who have lived here long enough to become suspicious of the word “free”, this is one of the nicer exceptions. You can take visitors, children, a date you are not yet willing to invest heavily in, or simply your own mildly exhausted self. The backdrop is better than most bars manage, and no one will insist on a minimum spend.

In a city that excels at noise, traffic and the administrative invention of inconvenience, there remains something pleasingly old-fashioned about music drifting across a park at dusk. Bangkok may not often hand you a graceful evening for nothing, but when it does, the least one can do is bring a mat and show up.