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Any Night of the Week

Based on Any Night of the Week: A D.I.Y. History of Toronto Music 1957-2001 (Coach House Books, 2020), this podcast takes the listener on a virtual walking tour through Toronto’s most musical neighbourhoods, with stops at key sites in Toronto’s music history. Author Jonny Dovercourt illuminates how the various hotbeds of the music scene migrated through different neighbourhoods throughout the city, as clusters of music venues, sometimes along a single street, fostered new scenes and movements.

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  2. 1.1 Yonge Street and the Downtown Core

1.1 Yonge Street and the Downtown Core

Oct 23, 2020

The history of Toronto’s music scene starts on Yonge Street, though the garish commercial strip has long since withered away as a hotbed for live music.

Walking north along Yonge from Queen up to Bloor, we take a chronological and geographical trip through history, from the debut of the New Symphony Orchestra at Massey Hall in the ‘20s, jazz at the Colonial Tavern in the late ‘40s, the heyday of rock’n’roll and R&B on “the Strip” in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and community spaces for Caribbean and LGBTQ+ musical expression; continuing through the sleazy hard rock era of the ‘70s, punk rock and new wave on the edges of the core in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and the birth of Canadian hip-hop at the Concert Hall in the mid-’80s.