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Most people know Ian and Sylvia by their signature songs—his “Four Strong Winds” and her “You Were On My Mind”—and think of them as the iconic Canadian folk duo of the early 1960s. But few beyond fans or aficionados are familiar with their fine subsequent solo work, or Sylvia’s with the wondrous Quartette. And fewer still are aware that the talented pair once pioneered the country-rock genre with their excellent band Great Speckled Bird. A superb new collection of live recordings should change all that. Produced by Danny Greenspoon, The Lost Tapes (Stony Plain Records) features 26 tracks recorded between 1971 and 1974, a time when Ian was hosting a popular weekly country music TV show (on wh...

For defunct rock groups, 1983 has become the year of the reunion. Among the acts from rock’s golden years re-forming are The Guess Who, The Animals, The Hollies and Simon and Garfunkel. But the most unexpected return is that of The Band, Canada’s most celebrated rock ensemble. Its farewell concert seven years ago was so lavish and final that it made any suggestion of reunion seem dishonest. Now, with a two-week, 11-city Canadian tour which began in Halifax and ends in Vancouver on July 18, The Band is back, although without the services of guitarist Robbie Robertson. From the heady days of the southern Ontario bar circuit in the 1960s to Martin Scorsese’s touching movie tribute, The Last Wal...

Stepping off a Greyhound bus from Toronto in 1961, a 17-year-old boy found himself in West Helena, Ark., by the banks of the Mississippi River, unable to believe his senses. “It smelled different and moved different,” Robbie Robertson recently recalled. “The people talked and dressed different. And the air was filled with thick and funky music.” The experience left an indelible impression on the budding guitarist and songwriter. Years later, Robertson drew on it to write some of rock’s most evocative songs—including “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” And he performed them with his group, The Band, which critic Greil Marcus has called “the best rock ’n’ roll band...

As museum pieces, they are the most humble of artifacts: a few report cards, a black leather jacket, a pair of government-issue eye glasses. Yet for many, the three objects are priceless. Once the property of John Lennon, those treasures are now on display at the recently opened Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, where they are already among its most popular exhibits. Looking at the articles, it is easy to see why: each of them brings the viewer closer to the real Lennon. His elementary school report card reveals that one of his teachers found rock’s future genius “hopeless,” while the well-worn, sloppy jacket somehow perfectly captures the musician’s irreverent charm....

His father cast a long shadow. Fela Anikulapo Kuti was a musical star and political icon whose global popularity made him both a hero and an enemy of the state in his native Nigeria. But Femi Kuti has learned to live in that shadow. As the son of the inventor of the politically charged, wildly percussive music known as Afro-beat, Femi has picked up where his legendary father, who died in 1997, left off. Signed to a French record label, Femi has taken Afro-beat and fused it with elements of soul and hip-hop to create one of this spring’s most talked-about releases. Titled Shoki Shoki (Barclay/Universal), the powerful album promises to make a star of the 37-year-old singer-saxophonist, who has...

For a British rock band with a salacious past, the setting was devilishly ironic: a former girls' boarding school, nestled in the moneyed hills of New England. For eight weeks this summer, The Rolling Stones took possession of the secluded Wykeham Rise School in the small northwest Connecticut town of Washington - a two-hour drive from New York City - to prepare for the band's first concert tour in seven years. The three-month tour opened with a blast of raw energy last week in Philadelphia and made a two-concert stop in Toronto this week, before going on to Vancouver, Montreal and about 36 U.S. cities. On a balmy afternoon last month at Wykeham Rise, bassist Bill Wyman, guitarist Ron Wood a...

Aaron Neville’s voice has the power to open doors. When he was a boy in his native New Orleans, he used to sing his way into basketball games and movie theatres, impressing ticket-takers so much with his sidewalk performances that they would let him in free. Then, in 1967, when Neville was a 26-year-old stevedore, his singing took him from the docks to the top of the charts with the achingly sweet ballad “Tell It like It Is.” Since then, his distinctive tenor has enriched the music that he and his three brothers make as the highly acclaimed New Orleans-flavored band The Neville Brothers, whose popularity expanded during the 1980s with such albums as Fiyo on the Bayou (1981) and Yellow Moon (...

The High Priestess of Freak is looking suspiciously like a Volvo Driving Soccer Mom. Dressed in a denim shirt, track pants and running shoes, with only a white, fun-fur cowboy hat hinting at her outlandish style, Macy Gray arrives at a studio in Burbank, California for a rehearsal with her seven-piece band. She’s late and her group has already run through most her repertoire. But the singer doesn’t seem the least bit concerned. Instead, Gray plonks herself down on a couch, curls her long, lanky frame up at one end of it and hides beneath the wide brim of her hat, nodding occasionally along to the music. She seems bored or at least tired—which would be entirely understandable, given that she’...

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...

For more than 25 years, Leon Redbone has been conjuring up the past with his Roaring Twenties show tunes and turn-of-the-century minstrel ditties. Wearing his trademark fedora and Groucho Marx moustache, he became a fixture on TV’s Saturday Night Live  and The Tonight Show  with Johnny Carson during the 1970s and ‘80s, when he attracted legions of fans and supporters, from Bonnie Raitt and Maria Muldaur to Tom Waits and Dr. John.  Another admirer, Bob Dylan, once told  Rolling Stone  magazine that if he ever formed his own record label, Leon Redbone would be his first signing. Now Dylan has complimented him again: several songs on Dylan’s latest album, the fine, back...