Music journalism, books and more

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...

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 ...

The passing of Chip Taylor brought the talents of the American songwriter into focus. People have remembered him for songs like “Angel of the Morning,” a hit for Merrilee Rush, and “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder), covered by Janis Joplin.  But for me, and many other teenagers in garage bands in the 1960s, Taylor’s “Wild Thing,” as recorded by the Troggs and then Jimi Hendrix, among countless others, is the one that changed everything.  A primitive, three-chord monster, it’s rivalled for brilliant, impossible-to-resist stupidity only by “Louie Louie,” written by Richard Berry and performed by the Kingsmen. My band thrashed its way through both of those songs, along with other nugget...

Music gives life to everything, Plato once wrote. The Greek philosopher might have added that it’s also the essential ingredient for any good party. In ancient Greece, well before the arrival of Christianity, music was central to the wild celebrations that pagans held to mark the changing seasons. The parties were so good that people clung on to them long after they became Christians. Christmas itself evolved out of the Roman Empire’s Saturnalia festival of light that celebrated the longest night of the year. And both Christmas and Hanukkah have given rise to a tradition of warm, music-filled social gatherings that help us endure those long cold nights.  When it comes to parties, Carniv...

The story of folk icon Neil Young and funk master Rick James were once being in a Yorkville band together has become the stuff of rock 'n' roll legend. They were unknowns at the time and the Mynah Birds just happened to be where their paths converged, along with those of Goldy McJohn and Nick St. Nicholas, future members of Steppenwolf, and Bruce Palmer, who ultimately wound up with his buddy Neil in Buffalo Springfield. The following story, largely excerpted from Nicholas Jennings’ Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound, published by Penguin Books in 1997, is one of the earliest accounts of the now storied Mynah Birds band. It draws on an extensive interview...

The Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm exhibit at the AGO is well worth seeing when it opens to the general public on March 24. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, with curation by the AGO’s Jim Shedden, the collection of 250 photographs from Paul McCartney’s personal archive gives a candid, insider’s view into the dizzying maelstrom that was the early years of Beatlemania in 1963 and then in '64, when they first landed on North American shores.  The photographs of John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and others, were all taken by McCartney on his Pentax camera, while shots of Paul himself were snapped by members of the Beatles entourage, like o...

Happy heavenly birthday to Stompin’ Tom Connors, the man who made it his mission to write and sing songs about all the people and places (or least as many of them as he could in his lifetime) that make up the great vastness that is Canada. In many ways, Connors was our Woody Guthrie: a voice for loggers, miners, truckers and ordinary Canadians.  I once got to interview the Stomper. It was 1990 and Connors was embarking on his first tour in 13 years on the condition that there were to be no radio presenters and no interviews given to the media, which he felt had trivialized his crusade to Canadianize the country's airwaves and its music industry.  But at the first stop, a ...

As a member of the Band, Richard Manuel gave the group its most soulful vocals and its signature bluesy backbone through his gritty, syncopated keyboard work. Although his role was huge, he never received the recognition he deserves, partly due to his own self-effacing nature and because, as his admirer Eric Claption put it, Manuel became "defined by his tragic end." That may change with Stephen Lewis' recent biography of the Band's unsung hero. Drawing from Levon Helm's book This Wheel's On Fire, Robbie Robertson's Testimony and the Daniel Roher-directed documentary Once Were Brothers, as well as interviews with Manuel's family and former bandmates and friends from his t...

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...