Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Tyson recently celebrated her 83rd birthday with this release, which she calls her final album. The folk legend ends her career on a high note, with a dozen songs that convey the wisdom of her years. “Leaves in the Storm” is an evocative love story set in post-war Berlin, with two lovers “too old to be innocent, too young to be wise.” The fiddle-fueled “Long Chain of Love” is a touching matriarchal family saga about the chains that bind. And the rollicking “Now Tell Me That You’ve Got the Blues” proves that Tyson, retiring or not, is a mama who can still barrelhouse with the best of them.

Any traditional music from the British Isles, when played well, can breathe history as if aged in wood. A pair of young Irish folksingers stopped briefly in Toronto to give listeners a taste of the bittersweet ballads and jaunty jigs from another era. Paul Brady and Andy Irvine are former members of Planxty, a now defunct Irish band whose versatile music won them fans all over Europe. As a duo, Brady and Irvine provide all the moods and memories of their homeland, captured in songs of classical splendour. Their performance at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Education Auditorium gave the audience tales as strange as the instruments to which they’re sung: “Wearing the Britches,” an admi...

They were a short-lived band that released just one single before breaking up. But the legend of the Rising Sons has continued to rise. Small wonder: the group served as the launching pad for a pair of young musicians who grew up to become two of the world’s most adventurous and celebrated musical explorers. The Rising Sons were formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by 17-year-olds Ryland Cooder and Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, better known as Taj Mahal, along with guitarist Jesse Lee Kincaid, drummer Ed Cassidy and bassist Gary Marker. Cassidy left soon after (he went on to become a founding member of the band Spirit) and was replaced by Kevin Kelley. Cooder sang and played six- and 12-string...

Long before the term “world music” became a popular catch-all for sounds from around the globe, Malka & Joso were singing songs in Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Creole French, Macedonian and Russian. During the mid-1960s, the handsome folk duo brought a distinctly international flavour to the Canadian folk scene, performing in coffeehouses and concert halls, at folk festivals and on television with their own weekly CBC program. Malka & Joso’s three albums for Capitol Records were the unlikely hits of the decade, outselling many of the label’s English-language albums. Malka Marom was born in Israel, the daughter of a cantor. Joso Spralja was born in the former Yugoslavia, the son of a fis...

Most drummers stick with the backbeat. With few exceptions (Levon Helm, Ringo Starr, Don Henley and Father John Misty come to mind), the dudes behind the kits rarely step forward to become solo artists in their own right. Toronto’s Martin Worthy has always been a different kind of drummer, one who could easily pick up a guitar and croon a sweet folk ballad or a wry country tune—songs he’d come up with when no one was watching. Although he started out in high school pounding the skins in various rock and soul bands, Worthy was really a singer-songwriter trapped in a drummer’s body. During the 1970s, Worthy partnered with his friend Paul Quarrington in a Seals & Croft-style folk duo called...