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 ...

A musical legend right here in our midst. When Music Africa recently discovered that Ali Birraa was living in Toronto, they did what any organization dedicated to promoting African music would do: they promptly gave the singer an Award of Merit.  A pioneer of Ethiopian music’s golden age in the ’70s, when funky orchestras with big brass and soulful singers ruled the Horn of Africa, Birraa has lived a charmed life. Recruited by Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band at the age of 18, he sang for kings, presidents and visiting dignitaries at the palace in Addis Ababa. His first hit, 1967’s “Jiruu Tiyya Cufaa (I Never Held Back My Love),” launched a solo career that saw his seven...

The Beatles changed the world in countless ways, but they also dramatically changed Toronto over three consecutive years of performances (1964 to 1966) at Maple Leaf Gardens. Almost overnight, the city was hit with a cultural shift of seismic proportions: Boys grew Beatle-bangs, girls pinned photos of John, Paul, George and Ringo on their walls and parents worried about the sanity of their teenaged children. Canada’s folk darlings, Ian & Sylvia, had ruled up to that point, but as the male half of that duo, Ian Tyson, remembers, “the minute the Beatles arrived, it was over – well and truly over.” The folk boom slowed, as every kid on the block rushed to form rock bands. Toronto’s music sc...

Toronto’s Queen Street, the portion running west from stately University to cosmopolitan Spadina, was originally a jumble of greasy spoons, barbershops and clothing stores. Owners lived above their shops, while children played on sidewalks. There were even a couple of watering holes that supplied the mostly Irish, Jewish and Eastern European locals with cold, cheap draft beer. By the late 1970s, those bars had become part of a fertile breeding ground, a creative hothouse of forceful protest, stylish adventure and uninhibited experimentation that produced an explosion of musical talent. In many ways, it paralleled the city’s fabled Yorkville scene of the previous decade, with a tight concentr...

When Peter Gabriel launched the first WOMAD festival in 1982—on a Somerset fairground with China's Tian Jin and the Burundi Drummers—non-Western music was virtually unknown in the pop world. Today, world music gets mainstream attention in publications such as Billboard, which has a regular world music chart. And its recordings, once hidden in the back of record stores in dusty international sections, receive prominent front-racking. Just check out the vast world-music display at HMV's megastore on Yonge St. Meanwhile, worldbeat's diverse sounds are featured in popular weekly radio shows like Global Rhythms, heard Saturday mornings locally on CIUT-FM. Toronto, in fact, is a hotbed for world m...