Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Zal Yanovsky may be the unlikeliest candidate for success ever to emerge from Toronto’s music scene. Before he joined Denny Doherty in the Halifax Three and headed south to serious Sixties fame in the Lovin’ Spoonful, Yanovsky was broke and scuffling around Yorkville and the Annex, learning to play guitar and stealing milk off front porches so he could collect the deposit from the bottles. Unable to afford rent anywhere, Yanovsky took to sleeping in a laundry dryer at 163 Dupont, right next door to the Gate of Cleve, where he perhaps dreamed he might one day perform.  In a poster designed by future realist painter Ken Danby, the Gate of Cleve coffeehouse advertised “folksongs and folk m...

They were a short-lived band that released just one single before breaking up. But the legend of the Rising Sons has continued to rise. Small wonder: the group served as the launching pad for a pair of young musicians who grew up to become two of the world’s most adventurous and celebrated musical explorers. The Rising Sons were formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by 17-year-olds Ryland Cooder and Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, better known as Taj Mahal, along with guitarist Jesse Lee Kincaid, drummer Ed Cassidy and bassist Gary Marker. Cassidy left soon after (he went on to become a founding member of the band Spirit) and was replaced by Kevin Kelley. Cooder sang and played six- and 12-string...

Long before the term “world music” became a popular catch-all for sounds from around the globe, Malka & Joso were singing songs in Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Creole French, Macedonian and Russian. During the mid-1960s, the handsome folk duo brought a distinctly international flavour to the Canadian folk scene, performing in coffeehouses and concert halls, at folk festivals and on television with their own weekly CBC program. Malka & Joso’s three albums for Capitol Records were the unlikely hits of the decade, outselling many of the label’s English-language albums. Malka Marom was born in Israel, the daughter of a cantor. Joso Spralja was born in the former Yugoslavia, the son of a fis...