Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

    Here are 19 favourite things I heard this year (in alphabetical order):   Aldous Harding  Designer Third album from the New Zealand singer-songwriter hits the mark with engaging, quirky and original folk music for the 21 st  century.   Angelique Kidjo  Celia  The African pop queen pays tribute to Cuban musical goddess Celia Cruz, with the same rich results she had with Talking Heads’  Remain in Light .   Bruce Cockburn  Crowing Ignites With his stunning, all instrumental album, the Canadian folk legend proves his exceptional guitar playing deserves as much acclaim as his songwriting.   Bruce Springsteen  Western Stars The 1...

Even in the Live-Aid era of pop music, when star-studded concerts for good causes have become a fixture on the rock ’n’ roll calendar, it was a landmark event. Amnesty International brought its  Human Rights Now!  show to Toronto last week, with an eight-hour concert featuring six of pop’s leading artists, kicking off the North American leg of the most ambitious world tour in rock history. The six-week tour, which began in London on Sept. 2, was to touch down in Montreal last Saturday before continuing to scheduled concerts this week in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco. While pop musicians in the 1980s have increasingly adopted social concerns and appeared in concerts ar...

He’s one of the most famous musicians of the 20 th  century and a rock guitarist of unparalleled talent. Although his mainstream career lasted only four years before his death on Sept. 18, 1970 of an apparent drug overdose, Jimi Hendrix shone so brightly that today his albums and concert appearances are the stuff of legend. The official Hendrix website, run by his estate, painstakingly catalogues every recording and performance he ever made under his own name. And many devoted fan sites do the same. As most fans know, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed twice in Toronto: once at the Canadian National Exhibition on Feb. 24, 1968, on a bill with England’s Soft Machine and Toronto’s own ...