Music journalism, books and more

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the mid-1960s, Toronto was teeming with pop groups and teenagers inspired by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. One of the city’s most popular bands, however, took its cues not from the British Invasion but from the rhythm-and-blues sound of American artists such as Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. That band was the Mandala. With a dazzling stage show featuring choreography, strobe lights and sonic effects, the Mandala became a sudden sensation. Dressed like costumed gangsters in striped suits, black shirts and white ties, the five members took their self-styled “soul crusade” across Canada, down to New York and out to Los Angeles, earning rave reviews for fever-pitched concerts that cri...

When Jack Long opened his first musical instrument store in Toronto in 1956, he was a skilled jazz trumpeter without a clue about business. “I didn’t even know what an invoice was,” he often said. Mr. Long learned the hard way. When sales were slow, he and a drummer friend, Jack McQuade, started giving lessons in the store’s back rooms. When they discovered colleagues often wanted to borrow instruments, Mr. Long invented modest rental fees: “three dollars if it was small, four dollars if it was bigger.” Together as partners, the two Jacks grew the company until 1965, when Mr. McQuade decided to pursue drumming full-time and sold his portion of the firm to Mr. Long. Today, the family-owned Lo...

From her birth as a daughter of Black settlers in the early 20th century to recognition as Vancouver’s first lady of jazz, Eleanor Collins was a trailblazer in music and African-Canadian history. Her role in breaking new ground for women and Black performers earned her membership in the Order of Canada in 2014. Then, in 2022, Canada Post featured Ms. Collins on a stamp, honouring her as the first Black Canadian entertainer – and first female Canadian singer – to star in her own nationally broadcast TV series, The Eleanor Show. Acknowledging the honour, Ms. Collins said she had no sense of her pioneering role back then. “We each did what we felt we were called to do – live in the present...

More than any other singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot personified Canada. His robust songs about winter nights, morning rain, being bound for Alberta and sailing on Ontario’s Georgian Bay came closest to expressing for many Canadians the essence of life in the Great White North. Historical epics stood alongside romantic ballads. Author Pierre Berton once said that Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” conveyed as much about the building of the national railway as his own best-selling book on the subject. When Lightfoot died Monday evening at the age of 84, leaving a vast legacy of more than 500 songs, Canada lost a masterful composer, a distinctive vocalist and one of its ...

It surprised no one who knew him that Mendelson Joe would choose to die entirely on his own terms. In a Feb. 7 post on his website titled “That’s It Folks,” the prolific, self-taught musician, painter and activist who had advanced Parkinson’s disease, wrote: “I have ended my job as multi-media artist with the provision of MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying).” Unable to resist a last chance to advocate his beliefs, he added: “I see MAID as a sign of a civilized society. To be born Canadian is a great blessing. We have free speech. We have healthcare. We have MAID. Thank you, Canada.” Mr. Joe was 78. Those closest to him remember a unique man, unwavering in his views and blunt in delivering the...