Last year, music lovers checked out almost half a million CDs tucked away in Toronto Public Library branches. Meet a few committed, long-time stack hunters and the man in charge of growing the collection.
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Kipling to Kensington, Trinity Bellwoods to Black Creek, these songs have soundtracked the neighbourhood for 40+ years and counting.
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Death metal bassist Miguel Angel Garcia recently expanded his made-from-home churros business into a commercial kitchen in the back of Steadfast Brewing, where he preps killer birria tacos, tamales and other Mexican street-food classics. When he works, he says, he’s always blasting music. “I like to feel like I’m at a party”
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The next day, I showed up ready to play ball. It was a lazy, fun game under the warm California sun. Bands and their crews were on each team. and it felt like family, everyone cheering each other on.
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Growing up we didn’t have a lot of superheroes that looked like we did. All the mainstream ones on TV and in comic books were white and most of them were men. So my cousins and I turned to sports for inspiration and to find people like us to look up to.
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One of my most memorable trips was playing indigenous day live in Whitehorse. I’d never been to Whitehorse before. I left a few days before the band to do a solo performance at the opening ceremonies.
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I loved collecting stones as a child. I was mesmerized by the smooth light-green ones. I didn’t know they were just shards of glass that had been eroded. Back then, when I was just a boy, it was like finding pirate treasure.
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It was the summer I turned 15, and music already had its grip on me. I was visiting my grandfather on the West Coast and listening to a lot of his old blues records and 8-tracks.
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Vortex Records was a little shop near the high school I went to, on Yonge Street above the Second Cup. It was the mid-'90s. Jerry Garcia had just died. I was going into grade 9 at North Toronto Collegiate and having a tough time trying to find my way.
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There was a time when Queen Street was the northern limits of Toronto. It’s about to become the last line of defence for live music.
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A feel-good, nostalgic genre of Japanese dance tunes called City Pop has become the kitchen soundtrack for a community of Toronto chefs – one that sets the tone for a kinder, brighter kitchen culture.
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Over the past five years, little more than a quarter of Toronto’s rehearsal spaces have survived, chipped away by an inflated real estate market and then the death knell of shutdowns. Now, a group of artists is banding together to defend what little space remains for making music.
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Travelling between hip-hop, pop, electronic music and neo-soul – and her homes in Cape Town, Toronto and B.C. – Zaki Ibrahim is hard to label. And that’s kind of the point.
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Taborah Johnson saw it all singing with the Mary Jane Girls for funk superfreak Rick James, and knows how to tell it, too.
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Parkdale Library’s free instrument-lending program, Katrina Onstad writes, is that rare civic project that shows us at our best.
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Elvis, The Stretch Marks, Lucinda, Tom Waits – my keenest memories are set to the mixed tape in my mind.
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Exhibition Place is home to the CNE, BMO Field and Medieval Times, but imagine if the 192 acres of publicly owned land were used to their wildest potential. Jessica Wilson asks five urban experts to wave their wands and make the Ex amazing.
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