Music journalism, books and more

Teenage Wasteland, a brand new comic book by best-selling writer Nicholas Jennings and award-winning cartoonist Robin Budd, is the mostly true tale of two teenage boys and their fledging garage band in the 1960s Toronto suburb of Don Mills—Canada’s first planned community. Part whimsical memoir, part local history, this lavishly illustrated, 80-page book tells of the pair’s laughable reach for rock-and-roll greatness. With cameos from local heroes Rush and Dan Hill, plus oodles of pop-culture references, Teenage Wasteland will appeal to music lovers and anyone who ever dreamed of starting a rock band. Pre-order now for $25 each and pick up your hardcover copy (or copies!) in T...

Some of the world’s best radio disc jockeys are cultural tastemakers, influencing music and helping to break new genres. Others are colourful personalities who attract ardent listeners with distinctive wit and dazzling delivery.  David Marsden, a Canadian broadcasting legend who died on Sept. 25 at the age of 85, had all that and more.  Over the course of an illustrious 63-year career that took him from AM and FM outlets across Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia to Canada’s first online radio hub, with occasional forays into television, Marsden stood out as a brave pop visionary and professional shapeshifter, revered by colleagues and admired by everyone from rock heroes Rush to ...

Reggae legend Bob Marley met calypso hero the Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco) in 1979 inside a New York City radio studio during a joint radio broadcast and press interview hosted by Trinidadian-born writer, storyteller and broadcaster Paul Keen Douglas. Writes journalist Janice Lawrence-Clarke, who posted this rare photogrqph on Facebook in September 2026 after Sparrow died: “The meeting was significant beyond the studio walls. Marley reportedly told Douglas that Sparrow’s politically charged 1964 song 'The Slave' had influenced his thinking about using music to address social and political issues. That influence is often connected to the conscious and revolutionary direction Marley purs...

Mike Daley’s book Yorkville: How a 1960s Coffee House Scene Rewrote Popular Music is a welcome deep dive into what was arguably Toronto’s most influential cultural district. It comes nearly 30 years after Penguin published my book on Yorkville, Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound.  Back then, I couldn’t believe there hadn’t already numerous books published on Yorkville, the way there had been on Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury and other scenes. After all, Yorkville had easily produced as many artists, both bands and singer-songwriters, that had made an impact at home and abroad.  Given it was the mid-1990s—the Palaeolithic period, long before Google...

South African jazz piano legend Abdullah Ibrahim, who passed away in June, left behind some extraordinary music on a vast array of over 70 recordings, including solo sessions, trio performances and large ensemble collaborations. Known as Dollar Brand before he converted to Islam and changed his named, Ibrahim was a gifted musician who possessed both deep spiritually and impeccable rhythm. A documentary about him was aptly named A Brother With Perfect Timing. A number of Ibrahim’s songs, including his transcendent epic piece “Mannenburg,” which became globally identified with the struggle against apartheid, have long been personal favourites. Smitten with his sound, I have collected many...

Canada’s David Clayton-Thomas was blessed with a big, booming baritone, one of the most recognizable voices in pop music, a gift that took him from the clubs and coffeehouses of Toronto’s Yonge Street and Yorkville all the way to Woodstock, Hollywood and beyond. As the frontman of jazz-rock pioneers Blood, Sweat & Tears, which topped the charts in 1969 with horn-driven hits like “And When I Die,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and his own “Spinning Wheel,” the singer lived a charmed life, winning awards, adulation and a king’s ransom of earnings that allowed him to indulge his taste for luxury cars and sprawling, palatial homes in coveted locations like the Catskill Mountains. But C...

Toronto’s Kensington Market in the 1960s was already the city’s most culturally diverse neighbourhood, a place writer Adele Wiseman described as brimming with “the sounds of Yiddish, Portuguese, Italian and the smell of fresh bread, brine and live chickens.” Within a few years, the Market’s sounds and smells grew infinitely richer and more tropical with the arrival of Caribbean entrepreneurs such as Stranger Cole. Cole, a renowned singer from Jamaica, accepted a friend’s offer to share space in his carpet store at 58 Kensington Avenue and began to sell recordings of jazz, gospel, disco and, predominantly, reggae music. Opening in 1978, Cole’s newly christened Roots Records became one of the ...

A musical legend right here in our midst. When Music Africa recently discovered that Ali Birraa was living in Toronto, they did what any organization dedicated to promoting African music would do: they promptly gave the singer an Award of Merit.  A pioneer of Ethiopian music’s golden age in the ’70s, when funky orchestras with big brass and soulful singers ruled the Horn of Africa, Birraa has lived a charmed life. Recruited by Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band at the age of 18, he sang for kings, presidents and visiting dignitaries at the palace in Addis Ababa. His first hit, 1967’s “Jiruu Tiyya Cufaa (I Never Held Back My Love),” launched a solo career that saw his seven...

Canada’s musical landscape in the early 1960s was dotted with smoky coffeehouses with folky minstrels inside, singing their hearts out to audiences hungry for emotional authenticity. This was the fertile ground from which sprang future icons such as Ian & Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot and, later, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. One of the brightest stars to emerge from that scene was David Wiffen. A dashing British émigré, Wiffen possessed all the qualities needed for fame and fortune. Tall, handsome, nattily attired and blessed with a captivating stage presence and a deep, stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks voice, he also had the songs — rich, blues-based confessionals about loss and ...

The passing of Chip Taylor brought the talents of the American songwriter into focus. People have remembered him for songs like “Angel of the Morning,” a hit for Merrilee Rush, and “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder), covered by Janis Joplin.  But for me, and many other teenagers in garage bands in the 1960s, Taylor’s “Wild Thing,” as recorded by the Troggs and then Jimi Hendrix, among countless others, is the one that changed everything.  A primitive, three-chord monster, it’s rivalled for brilliant, impossible-to-resist stupidity only by “Louie Louie,” written by Richard Berry and performed by the Kingsmen. My band thrashed its way through both of those songs, along with other nugget...