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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 ...

To walk through the middle of Toronto's Kensington Market on a Saturday in the early ’80s was to enter what locals called the “wobble zone.” There on a stretch of Kensington Avenue, between St. Andrew and Baldwin, the booming bass sounds coming from two sets of opposing speakers could throw passersby a little off balance. The duelling sound systems, like something out of The Harder They Come, belonged to a pair of Jamaican expat musicians who ran competing reggae record shops, each facing the other. Stranger Cole came first, in 1978, launching his Roots Records store – the first Caribbean business in the Market – at 58 Kensington. Four years later, Rannie “Bop” Williams opened Record Corner ...