Music journalism, books and more

Peter Goddard, who passed away in 2022, left a vast archive of writing about music. As Canada's first on-staff popular music newspaper critic, he charted the way for others to follow, writing intelligent reviews, profiles and feature articles about artists and trends. He wrote constantly, yet always with great care and thoughtfulness, about his subjects, returning to the newsroom after an interview or concert and working into the wee hours to turn around a review or feature for the next day's paper.  Goddard wasn't just tireless and prolific in his work. He was writing from a deeply informed place: he studied music history and was a musician himself. A graduate of the Royal Conservatory...

He’s one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century and a rock guitarist of unparalleled talent. Although his mainstream career lasted only four years before his death on Sept. 18, 1970 of an apparent drug overdose, Jimi Hendrix shone so brightly that today his albums and concert appearances are the stuff of legend. The official Hendrix website, run by his estate, painstakingly catalogues every recording and performance he ever made under his own name. And many devoted fan sites do the same. As most fans know, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed twice in Toronto: once at the Canadian National Exhibition on Feb. 24, 1968, on a bill with England’s Soft Machine and Toronto’s own Pa...

Silky vocals and soaring falsetto are his trademarks. So, too, are soul-baring lyrics and slowed-down, smoothed-out r&b. All of which has made Caesar, who won a Grammy for his debut, a modern quiet-storm sensation. With his excellent third album, the Toronto artist cranks up the emotion—but not the tempo. Songs like the hook-laden “Always” and the dream-like “Pain is Inevitable” deal with vulnerability and heartbreak, while the sultry “Let Me Go” is like a candle-lit bath. Brimming with confidence even as he expresses doubts about fame, Caesar’s latest finds the talented singer at the top of his game. 

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...

Oscar Peterson is remembered as a gifted pianist who could play it all, from Chopin and Liszt to blues, stride, boogie and beyond. Peterson led his own jazz trios, performed with such legendary figures as Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, who dubbed him “the man with four hands,” won eight Grammy Awards and Canada’s prestigious Glenn Gould Prize. Called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, he released over 200 recordings before his death in 2007, including his 1956 Stratford Festival recording, 1958’s On the Town, recorded at Toronto’s Town Tavern, and 1962’s Night Train, which featured a number of Ellington pieces a...