Canadian music genres

Metal

Going back to the late 1960s, Canada has produced metal bands that have and continue to influence metal bands to this day. In 1964, Toronto-based band The Sparrows was formed. This band later changed their name to Steppenwolf and featured Canadians John Kay, Goldy McJohn and Jerry Edmonton. Steppenwolf's 1968 single "Born to be Wild" was the first use of the words 'heavy metal' in a song's lyric. In 1970, Woodstock, Ontario based Warpig released their metal music debut, which, although never reaching mainstream success like fellow heavy metal bands Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer, has become a cult favourite within the Doom metal scene.

Some of Canada's most successful metal bands opted to change their style from the early 1980s roots metal sound to the growing glam metal style that became mainstream in the late 1980s. Bands like Helix, Kick Axe, Brighton Rock, Killer Dwarfs, Annihilator, and Slik Toxik saw growing popularity in the mid 1980s thanks in part to Much Music and MTV playing their videos in regular rotation.

Canada's death metal scene has produced artists most of whom are based out of Quebec. Bands like Kataklysm, Cryptopsy, Quo Vadis, Gorguts, Augury, Voivod, Martyr, and Neuraxis have a strong underground following and are signed to major independent metal labels. In the 2000s, Canadian extreme metal has been put on the map by Vancouver band Strapping Young Lad (featuring Devin Townsend), 3 Inches of Blood, Ottawa grindcore quartet Fuck The Facts, Regina band Into Eternity, and progressive metal band Protest the Hero. James Labrie lead singer of Dream Theater is Canadian born. Some notable black metal bands have come from Ontario, including Woods of Ypres, Wolven Ancestry, Zogroth and Eclipse Eternal. The cult black/death metal band Blasphemy, formed in 1984 in British Columbia, are still touring despite not having released a studio album since 1993. Canada has a very strong underground metal scene in cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Quebec City.

In the early 1980s, Vancouver gained itself the reputation of being called the "Metal Central of Canada". To the present day, Vancouver still holds the reputation and has become a favourite city for many touring bands across the world.

Classical

In Canada, classical music includes a range of musical styles rooted in the traditions of Western or European classical music that European settlers brought to the country from the 17th century and onwards. As well, it includes musical styles brought by other ethnic communities from the 19th century and onwards, such as Indian classical music (Hindustani and Carnatic music) and Chinese classical music.

Canada has produced a number of respected ensembles, including the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, as well as a number of well-known Baroque orchestras and chamber ensembles, such as the I Musici de Montréal Chamber Orchestra and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir. Major Canadian opera companies such as the Canadian Opera Company have nurtured the talents of Canadian opera singers such as Maureen Forrester, Ben Heppner, and Jon Vickers. Well-known Canadian musicians include pianist Glenn Gould; violinist James Ehnes; flautist Timothy Hutchins; and composers R. Murray Schafer and Harry Somers. Well-known music schools include the Royal Conservatory of Music (Canada) in Toronto and the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montréal.

Rock

Canadian rock describes a wide and diverse variety of music produced by Canadians, starting with American-style Rock and roll in the mid-20th century. Since then Canada has had a considerable impact on the development of the modern popular music called rock. Canada has produced many of the genre's most significant groups and performers, while contributing significantly to the development of the most popular subgenres, which include alternative rock, pop rock, progressive rock, country rock, folk rock, hard rock, punk rock, metal and indie rock.

Canada has been a source of rock and roll music for decades, beginning with "The Mocking Bird" originally recorded by The Four Lads in 1952 reaching #23 on the Billboard chart that year. It was re-released four years later reaching #67 on the 1956 chart. The first Canadian with a No. 1 American Billboard hit was 16-year-old Paul Anka. In 1957 he went to New York City where he recorded his own composition, "Diana". The song brought him instant stardom selling more than nine million copies in sixteen countries, reaching No. 1 on the U.S. and Canadian charts. Since then, Canada has produced many internationally popular rock and roll artists.

Perhaps the most notable Canadian rock band is Rush, who currently place fifth behind The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, KISS and Aerosmith for the most consecutive gold and platinum albums by a rock band. Other notable musicians; Thousand Foot Krutch, The Guess Who, BTO, Nickelback, Three Days Grace, The Tragically Hip, Our Lady Peace, Sum 41, Alanis Morissette, Billy Talent, Simple Plan, Finger 11 and Metric. Toronto-based band The Birthday Massacre has established a very faithful fanbase spreading across the globe.

Blues

The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes, often with a repetitive twelve-bar structure, which evolved in the United States in the communities of former African slaves. Canadian blues refers to the blues and blues-related music (e.g. blues-rock, folk blues, etc.) performed by blues bands and performers in Canada. In Canada, there are hundreds of local and regionally based Canadian blues bands and performers. As well, there is a smaller number of bands or performers that have achieved national or international prominence. These bands and performers are part of a broader Canadian "blues scene" that also includes city or regional blues societies, blues radio shows, and blues festivals.

A small number of Canadian blues bands and artists have achieved national or international prominence by touring across Canada, the US, or Europe, and releasing recordings that have received critical or audience acclaim in Canada and abroad. The performers below are listed according to the decade during which they first achieved national or international prominence:

Hip hop

The Canadian hip hop scene was first established in the 1980s. Through a variety of factors, however, it developed much more slowly than Canada's popular rock music scene, and apart from a short-lived burst of mainstream popularity from 1989 to 1991, it remained largely an underground phenomenon until the early 2000s. Canada had hip hop artists right from the early days of the scene — the first known Canadian rap single, Singing Fools' "The Bum Rap", was released in 1982. With some exception; most notably "campus/community radio," the promotional infrastructure simply wasn't there to get most artists' music to the record-buying public. Even Toronto– Canada's largest city and one of its most multicultural– had difficulty getting an urban music station on the radio airwaves until 2000. As a result, if a Canadian hip-hop artist could get signed, it was very difficult for them to get exposure — even if their music videos were played on MuchMusic, many artists simply couldn't get their records into stores or played on mainstream radio.

As a result, through much of the 1990s, Canadian hip hop experienced a slowdown without any significant artists bursting into the scene. However, beginning in 1998, a sequence of events spurred by the anthemic collaborative single "Northern Touch" finally brought hip hop back into the mainstream of Canadian music. Allmusic has stated that Canadian hip hop is the "best-kept secret in hip-hop." Some of the most well known Canadian rappers and hip-hop artists include Drake, who is the only non-American who is signed into Young Money. Maestro Fresh-Wes, Classified, K'Naan, Kardinal Offishall, Belly and K-os are the other significant rappers and hip-hop artists from Canada.

Jazz

Jazz is a genre of African American music present in Canada since at least the 1910s. In 1919–1920 in Vancouver, Jelly Roll Morton, a New Orleans pianist, played with his band. During that period, Canadian groups such as the Winnipeg Jazz Babies and the Westmount Jazz Band of Montreal also found regional acclaim.

During the swing boom of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Canada produced such notable bandleaders as Ellis McLintock, Bert Niosi, Jimmy Davidson, Mart Kenney, Stan Wood, and Sandy De Santis. In the 1940s, Bert Niosi and Oscar Peterson became widely known. Peterson became internationally acclaimed, and is a widely respected Canadian jazz musician.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the jazz fusion band Uzeb was a well known domestic and international jazz group. Since 2000, a brand new list of Canadian jazz artists has risen to prominence, including Diana Krall, Michael Bublé, Matt Dusk, and Molly Johnson – often attracting international acclaim and success. Other highly notable Canadian jazz artists are Ed Bickert, Lenny Breau (born in Maine but lived in Canada), and Gil Evans.

Country

Country music evolved out of the diverse musical practices of the Appalachian region of the United States. Appalachian folk music was largely Scottish and Irish, with an important influence also being the African American country blues. Parts of Ontario, British Columbia and the Maritime provinces shared a tradition with the Appalachian region, and country music became popular quite quickly in these places. Fiddlers like George Wade and Don Messer helped to popularize the style, beginning in the late 1920s. Wade was not signed until the 1930s, when Victor Record's, inspired by the success of Wilf Carter the year before, signed him, Hank Snow and Hank LaRivière.

Canadian country as developed by Otto Wilke, Carter, Snow and Earl Heywood, used a less nasal and more distinctly pronounced vocal style than American music, and stuck with more traditional ballads and narratives while American country began to use more songs about bars and lovers' quarrels. This style of country music became very popular in Canada over the next couple of decades. Later popular Canadian country stars range from Stompin' Tom Connors to Shania Twain to Rick Tippe.

Radio and television stations in Canada which play country music, however, are often more flexible in how they define the genre than their counterparts in the United States. Canadian country stations frequently play artists more commonly associated with folk music, such as Bruce Cockburn, Leahy and The Rankin Family.

Traditional

Canadian fiddle is the aggregate body of tunes, styles and musicians engaging in the traditional folk music of Canada on the fiddle. It is an integral extension of the Anglo-Celtic and Québécois Frenchfolk music tradition but has distinct features found only in the Western hemisphere. Due to immigration and cross-border commerce, Canadian fiddle is part of the American fiddle repertoire. Old time and fiddle music are well represented by such Canadian exponents as Jerry Holland, Natalie MacMaster, Sierra Noble, The Rankin Family, and Ashley MacIsaac.

Folk

Some of Canada's most influential folk artists also emerged in this era, notably Stan Rogers, Ferron, Wade Hemsworth, Murray McLauchlan, and Kate & Anna McGarrigle.

In the 1970s, chansonniers grew steadily less popular with the encroachment of popular rock bands and other artists. Some performers did emerge, however, including Jacques Michel, Claude Dubois, and Robert Charlebois.Modern folk music is very much present in Canada, being home to successful folk artists such as Great Lake Swimmers, City and Colour, Basia Bulat, Joel Plaskett, and Old Man Luedecke. There is also a growing scene of underground folk emerging across Canada. This movement can be represented by artists like Andy Shauf, Matthew Joel, Tyler Gilbert, and Two Bicycles.

Toronto goth scene

The Toronto goth scene, the cultural locus of the goth subculture in Toronto and the associated music and fashion scene, has distinct origins from goth scenes of other goth subcultural centres, such as the UK or Germany. Originally known as the "freaks", the term "goth" appeared only after 1988, when it was applied to the pre-existent subculture. Distinctive features included internationally recognized gothic and vampiric fashion store 'Siren', a goth-industrial bar named 'Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar', and Forever Knight, a television series about an 800-year-old vampire living in Toronto. In Toronto, the goths did not seek to reject mainstream status, and achieved partial acceptance throughout the mid to late 1990s, and in 1998 Toronto was reported to have a higher concentration of goths than any other city in the world. The goth subculture faced public suspicion and the local goth scene declined after allegedly goth-related acts of violence, the Columbine High School massacre in particular.

Chansonniers

Chansonniers were French Canadian singer-songwriters from the 1950s and 1960s. They sang simple, poetic songs with a social conscience. The first chansonniers were La Bolduc, Raymond Lévesque and Félix Leclerc. It was not until the 1960s, however, that chansonniers became such a major part of the Québécois music scene. This was largely due to the formation of Les Bozos in 1959. Les Bozos was an informal collective of chansonniers, including Lévesque, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Claude Léveillée, Clémence DesRochers, Talon Starsdawn, and Jacques Blanchet.

With the first stars popularizing the chansonnier format, a new generation of popular singers emerged in the 1960s. These included Gilles Vigneault, Pierre Létourneau, Pierre Calvé, Hervé Brousseau, Georges Dor, Monique Miville-Deschênes, and Claude Gauthier. The boîtes à chansons, a kind of performance place for chansonniers (akin to coffee houses in the United States), also appeared during the 1960s, spread across Quebec.

The Chansonnier tradition has continued with artists who have been carrying on since the 1970s to the present. One good example is Diane Dufresne who also is prolific in the area of cabaret or theatre-rock.

Electronic music

Gaining speed in the west of Canada, the electronic music scene grows rapidly within most major centres.

Internationally renowned electronic artists from Canada include Winnipeg-based breakcore artist Aaron Funk a.k.a. Venetian Snares, minimal techno artist and DJ Richie Hawtin, electro-dance artist and DJ deadmau5, experimental electronic metal artist Pim Zond,dub techno producer Deadbeat, lo-fi electronica band Holy Fuck, whose music has been featured in commercials for General Motors, Montreal-based electrofunk duo Chromeo, Toronto-formed Crystal Castles, whose music is considered electro-punk, the duo's front woman Alice Glass topped NME's Cool List for 2008, indie-electronica group Junior Boys & quirky sound-artist Vitaminsforyou. Albertan electronica musicians include Mark Templeton, Escapist Opportunities, and organizers Electronic Music Calgary, creating venues throughout the province, though mainly in Calgary. Monstercat, an electronic dance music label, is based out of Waterloo, Ontario, and has its headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Industrial

Canadian artists have had a significant impact on industrial music worldwide, and Canada is considered by many to be one of the birthplaces of modern industrial music. The first wave of Canadian industrial music was born out of the Juno Award-winning new wave act, Images in Vogue. From this Vancouver-based band, guitarist Don Gordon went on to found Numb, and percussionist Kevin Crompton left in 1985 to focus on his side project, Skinny Puppy. Quickly signed to Nettwerk Records, Skinny Puppy is still an influential industrial act. Skinny Puppy has spawned numerous sideprojects over the years, including Hilt, Download, The Tear Garden, Doubting Thomas, ohGr, Cyberaktif, and others.

Out of this environment also came Front Line Assembly, formed by former Skinny Puppy member Bill Leeb in 1986. Joined by Rhys Fulber (and later by Chris Peterson), FLA became one of the most commercially successful electro-industrial acts of the 1990s, and spawned a host of sideprojects, including (but not limited to) Conjure One, Pro-Tech, Synæsthesia, Will, Intermix, Noise Unit, Equinox, Cyberaktif, Mutual Mortuary, and the vastly successful Delerium, which began life as an ambient project.

And on the distaff side, also from Vancouver's early electronic/industrial scene; Madelaine Morris, the fab front women in Mark Jowett's early electronica project, Moev. And Myra Davies, who built her reputation in the Euro Underground, notably in collaborations with Berliner Gudrun Gut, but entered the scene through her association in Vancouver with Skinny Puppy. The Pups connected her to Neubauten who invited her to Berlin where she met Gudrun Gut (ex Neubauten, Malaria, and many other projects). In 1991, Davies and Gut formed MIASMA; a wide ranging project with a fantasy 'dark cabaret' vibre. Davies and Gutare still working together with Davies recording under her own name on Gut's label and Gut producing and programming. The latest Myra Davies CD (Cities and Girls) includes a track with Alexander Hacke(Neubauten)and one with Beate Bartel (orig Neubuaten, Malaria, Liaisons Dangereuse).

Punk

Bands from across Canada contribute to the punk rock and hardcore scenes. D.O.A. of Vancouver founded Canadian hardcore punk rock along with their American counterparts in the early 1980s. Bands from Distort Entertainment have been gaining prominence through extensive touring and Much Music video rotation, including Alexisonfire (from St. Catharines, Ontario, active from 2001 to 2012) and Cancer Bats (from Toronto, active 2004–present). Others include Subhumans (active from 1978 to 1983 and 2005–present), Dayglo Abortions (active 1979–present), SNFU (active for most of the period from 1981–present), and Daggermouth (active 2004-2008)(all from Vancouver), Propagandhi (from Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, active 1986–present), Silverstein (from Burlington, Ontario, active 2000–present), The 3tards (from Brampton, Ontario, active 2001–present), Fucked Up (from Toronto, active 2001–present), Cursed (from Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, active 2001-2008), and Comeback Kid (from Winnipeg, active 2002–present). Fucked Up is notable for winning the 2009 Polaris Music Prize for their album The Chemistry of Common Life.