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On a wintery night at Toronto’s plush Koerner Hall, inside the city’s stately Royal Conservatory of Music, two generations of calypso stars are busy heating up the audience. Onstage in the foreground is the reigning queen, Trinidad & Tobago’s Calypso Rose. Just behind her is the crown prince, Drew Gonsalves, whose Canadian band Kobo Town has opened the show and is now backing the headliner. As the cheeky Rose sings and shimmies through her set to the crowd’s delight, the bearded, bespectacled, guitar-strumming Gonsalves is visibly beaming: he co-wrote and arranged many of the songs Rose is performing, all taken from her award-winning comeback album, Far From Home. And now he and the sept...

The “Seven Nation Army” rock hero’s latest is an odd delight, full of hip-hop beats, gypsy fiddle, funky organ, a Dvořák melody and a hilarious spoken word piece, “Abulia and Akrasia,” by Aussie blues revivalist C.W. Stoneking. The most Jack White track is the blistering rock of “Over and Over and Over,” originally written for the White Stripes.

Neil wears many hats–including that of filmmaker. His latest project, a western, sees the 72-year-old Canadian rocker join forces with his romantic partner Daryl Hannah (Splash, Kill Bill), who wrote and directed the movie. Available on Netflix and centred around a group of outlaws hiding out in the mountains, Paradox stars Neil, fellow music legend Willie Nelson, and Willie’s sons, Lukas and Micah, who are members of Neil’s backing band Promise of the Real. The movie’s soundtrack features Neil’s solo score together with solo and band performances. There are campfire-style renditions of blues songs like Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do” and Lead Belly’s “How Long...

He’s the man who first brought the Beatles’ music to Canada—almost a full year before America embraced Beatlemania. He then opened the doors for other British Invasion acts and went on to sign the first wave of Canadian pop artists during the 1960s, including Anne Murray and Edward Bear, in his capacity as Capitol Records’ artists & repertoire executive in Canada. When Paul White died on March 13, after a cardiac arrest, the music industry mourned the loss of a jovial gentleman and creative trailblazer. Along with issuing Beatles’ singles, beginning with “Love Me Do” on February 18, 1963 and hitting number one with “She Loves You” by the end of the year, White designed and compiled sever...

On his 15th album, Moby returns to that organic-electronic mix of his 1999 breakthrough Play, employing frequent collaborator Mindy Jones to add to the dreamy feel of “The Tired and the Hurt” and Raquel Rodriguez to provide breathy accompaniment to “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” both anthems to the age of uncertainty.

The former Talking Head is a restless soul, undertaking books, films, operas, photographs and drawings to express his quirky views. His latest album, a collaboration with longtime cohort Brian Eno, offers a surprising antidote to the world’s depressing news: optimism—conveyed on joyously melodic tracks like “Here” and “Every Day is a Miracle.”

Gordon Lightfoot has always been fascinated by big mechanical things like trains and boats and planes, and man’s relationship to them. Three of his most famous songs, “Early Morning Rain,” “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” deal in the romance and tragedy of human interaction with the machinery of those forms of transportation. Personal and poetic, “Early Morning Rain” expressed a palpable longing while expertly contrasting the rural past and urban present in one brilliant line about freight trains and jet planes. Lightfoot placed himself directly in the story, summoning his own experience of travel and homesickness for inspiration. His memories of big 707s...

She’s not entirely new to the scene, having released a pop music EP in 2013. But Canada’s Elise LeGrow is now getting an international buzz, thanks to her sizzling debut album, Playing Chess. Working with soul legend Betty Wright, the Roots’ Questlove and members of the Dap Kings, who once backed Amy Winehouse, the 30-year-old Toronto singer puts a fresh spin on classic r&b songs from Chicago’s iconic Chess record label. She turns Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” into a wistful ballad, gives Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” a haunting rock edge and transforms Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me,” into slow, sultry jazz. Already the album, released on New York’s S-Curve Records, home of Joss Stone...

The brainchild of Toronto-based, Illinois-born Meg Remy, U.S. Girls’ latest is a deliciously subversive affair: tart political protests wrapped in sweetly seductive dance grooves. The Juno-nominated artist conveys anger over American gun violence with the Blondie-style disco of “Mad as Hell” and expresses rage about sexual assault with lush horns reminiscent of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”

She’s billed as a Canadian jazz sensation. But Cole, a gifted singer and two-time Juno Award winner, has never belonged to any one category. That’s because the Halifax native has always been too adventurous. Her first hit was a version of Johnny Nash’s reggae classic “I Can See Clearly Now” and she’s since covered everyone from the Beatles to, most frequently, Tom Waits. Blessed with playful personality, Cole has consistently taken her versatile contralto to unexpected places. That’s true of her ninth album—and first in five years. Although the material is drawn entirely from the American Songbook, there’s nothing conventional about Cole’s approach. Backed stellar musicians, including her lo...