Corby's Orbit
Listening in All the High Places illustration by John Kricfalusi
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Playlist For Corby's Orbit Show Of 22 May 2026
Commissioner of Selection - Paul Corby
* Canadian Artists in Asterisk'd RED
The Mixcloud Podcast Link is RIGHT HERE
Click on images to enlarge
( Brought to you by Elemental Piques and Skeweresses )
5:00 Let These Days Be Our Delight
Illustration by Sarah Arnett
*The Outfit feat. Carson McHone ~ Cardinal Star ~ NEW RELEASE
* Julie Doiron & Status / Non-Status ~ Good Enough ~ NEW RELEASE
* Tia Wood ~ Stimulated ~ NEW RELEASE
Illustration by Igor Volkov
* Walk Off The Earth ~ Afraid Of Heights ~ NEW RELEASE
Bruce Hornsby ~ Indigo Park ~ NEW RELEASE
* Cat Clyde ~ Man's World ~ NEW RELEASE
* Edwin Raphael ~ First Time On Earth ~ I Know A Garden ~ PRE RELEASE
* Allegra Jordyn ~ Fingertips ~ NEW RELEASE
Illustration by Jim Woodring
* Aquakultre ~ What Are You Sayin'? ~ 1783 ~ NEW RELEASE
* Geordie Gordon ~ Endless Line ~ River Round ~ NEW RELEASE
5:40 Crucial As Usual
* The Southern Residents ~ Devyn Gale ~ Folk Signals ~NEW RELEASE / Juno Nominee
* Robben Ford ~ I Make My Own Weather ~ Two Shades Of Blue ~ NEW RELEASE
* Matt Andersen ~ The Hammer & The Rose ~ The Hammer & The Rose ~ @ Massey Hall Tonight ~Juno Nominee
* Jessica Rhaye & The Ramshackle Parade ~ My Heart Belongs To You ~ NEW RELEASE
* The McDades ~ Gardener's Child ~ Thread The Light ~ NEW RELEASE
Lola Young ~ Post Sex Clarity ~ I'm Only F**cking Myself
Momoko Gill ~ No Others ~ Momoko ~ NEW RELEASE
* Suzanne Jarvie ~ Intro / Caterpillar / 40% ~ Mother's Day ~ NEW RELEASE
6:20 Emotional Allure
* Charlotte Cornfield feat. Feist ~ Living With It ~ NEW RELEASE
* Olivia Penalva ~ Distance Makes A Love Story ~ NEW RELEASE
* Clela Errington ~ Don't Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down ~ Walking Each Other Home* Desiree Dorion & Status/ Non-Status ~ Daddy's Tattoo ~ NEW RELEASE
* Semiah ~ Clementine ~ NEW RELEASE
* Cris Derksen (1981 – May 15, 2026) ~ Top Shelf / Buffalo Girls ~ The Visit
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Corby's Orbit Blog Receives Its One Millionth Hit - Obscurity Now Endangered
Intro by Heather Kitching. editor, Roots Music Canada:
In addition to writing for Roots Music Canada, Paul Corby hosts Corby’s Orbit on Radio Regent in Toronto and maintains a 16 year-old blog dedicated to the show. This month, he is celebrating 25 years on air, and the one millionth hit on his blog today, and he wrote this lovely piece in celebration.
I am but a small-shot DJ, clinging to the precarious meniscus of
Canadian radio. I have maintained a dedicated blog and a weekly music broadcast
for sixteen years. I have been doing the job for even longer.
Twenty-five years ago this month, before anyone had ever driven a car into a crowd or an airplane into a skyscraper, I got up at 5 a.m. on a morning smelling of coffee, ozone and newsprint, and lugged a crate of L.P.s, and a bag of CDs slung over my shoulder, downtown to Yonge and Dundas on the very early, and eerily empty subway to go to air with my first show on CKLN.FM. I was the fill-in host for Bill Grove, the dark mega-far-out jazz cogno / renegade, who had recently been dismissed for one of his flammably candid on-air comments. I had gone down to complain about his firing to the station manager, Tim May, and he responded, astoundingly, by saying “You want a shot at the show?”
So at 7 a.m., I put on the headphones, slid up the faders, said
good morning, and played Oscar Peterson’s rich solo version of “Django”,
dedicating the day’s programming to its composer, the MJQ’s John Lewis, who had
just recently slipped the surly bonds for real. Then I spun King Curtis’
boiling take on “The Swinging Shepherd Blues” (original title – “Blues a la
Canadiana”), and on to Ornette, Kerouac, Charles Lloyd…”Thanks for keeping it real,”
said a guy on the phone, and hung up. At eleven, my airwave idol, New
Electronic Soul DJ, Denise Benson, came in to do her show and gave me some
complimentary encouragement. As I left, DJ Tony Barnes advised me that I needed
a course at “NO-‘UM’ school.”
Including those mentioned above, my thanks for generous advice
and opportunities also go out to the late Ron Gaskin, Wally Dawson, Greg
Lawson, Steve Balla, Victor Bains Marshall, Julie Hill, Ron Anicich, Ian Danzig, Stevie
Connor, Denna Morgan, Daniel, Jackie, Stuart, Adonis, Amil, Tyrone, Pat, Erdine, my Orbital videographers
Otis, Jake and Dimitri, and let me raise shouts to my three shining DJ
exemplars, CKLN’s (now CIUT’s) David Kingston, the late Reiner Schwarz at CFNY,
and the legendary Tom Shannon at CKLW. Special appreciation must be accorded to
those legions of adventurous promoters and publicists who understand and
empathize with talent, who have brought me music and personalities to feature
on the Orbit. And most of all - thank you to all of my persistent Orbital
listeners.
These fans and colleagues have nurtured in me a love for Canadian musicians that I had already begun to cultivate during 20 years of prolonged road-burn as a touring guitar player. I have learned to listen deep and to help to break artists out of their struggle with critical obfuscation and media blind-spots, and give them their interview time, a platform to play out their visions, the odd gig, and the chance to say, “Oh, we’re doing well on campus and community radio,” or “There’s a DJ in Toronto playing our record.” Thank you for beautifying my show with your music.
My programming allegiance has always been to the unique
querulous voices maintaining their cool in the torrents of Toronto’s mass
communication vortex. I have lost friends and alienated people by criticizing
the mediocrity of many of our accepted CBC/Juno darlings, and especially their
well-paid supporting cast. Consequently, many brave outlying iconoclasts have
given me significant love as I have proceeded to wade my way through the dank
and stormy programming bogs, while exposing my sometimes scabrous comments about the Canadian media model,
which I prefer to think of as “being funny.” There are many of its many members who continue to fight the good fight (see above). My sincere appreciation goes out
to them all, most especially to Heather Kitching, my editor and bestie at Roots
Music Canada.
Last fall at a budget meeting, our station, Radio Regent, was almost extinguished overnight by a panel of accountants. Only a last-minute staff shuffle changed the vote and kept our station on the air.
I gratefully maintain a tenuous place
in your ear-waves for now. I hope to bring many more emerging and enduring
voices across your event horizons as long as the need for exploratory radio
survives. Until that time the Orbit remains up, and up, but definitely not,
yet, away.
Friday, May 22, 2026
Extraordinary Manifestations Of Contemporary Canadian Musical Phenomena TODAY!
illustration by Moebius
Monday, May 18, 2026
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Remembering Pioneering Canadian Reggae Artist Ernie Smith
Corby, Smith, Clive Ross & Tony Nicholson behind Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, 1979
Originally published in Roots Music Canada
Music lovers everywhere lost a good friend with the departure last month of Glenroy Anthony Michael Archangelo Smith. He had been about to celebrate his 81st birthday.
He was an internationally famous and widely beloved Jamaican Canadian artist who excelled as both a singer and a songwriter. He spent many years living in Toronto, recording and performing original reggae music. His funeral was today in Miami.
He became known professionally as “Ernie” Smith in reference to his guitar skills, which were held to be akin to those of Ernie Ranglin, Jamaica’s foremost guitar player. Smith’s sense of rhythm on the instrument was sublime, and his lead work was bold yet tasteful.
When I was playing guitar with Ernie’s band, Roots Revival, in the late 70s and early 80s, we decided to keep the band as a two-guitar unit, filling in reggae’s convertional keyboard “bubble” with interlocking patterns of rhythm guitar. There was no precedent for this format in professional reggae, nor have I seen anything similar since. Such a configuration is known colloquially by Jamaicans as a “blues jam.”
As a bandleader, Ernie also assumed the authority of his other assigned name, Archangelo, which cast him as a high-ranking angel, overseeing other angels.
Believe me, none of us in Roots Revival were angels, but as messengers of reggae music, we did feel a serious obligation to administer our musical mission with a ritual level of intensity, praying before every show, making liberal use of the herbal sacraments, and boosting audience energies with as much shamanistic gusto as we could rally on any given night.
We pulled this off onstage with a lively mix of Ernie’s barefoot vocal muscularity, the intense energy of the teenage Trinidadian drum dynamo Wadi Daniel, the serene and subliminal thunder and smooth vocalizations of bassist Clive Ross, and the wiry blasts of vigorous melody and movement emanating from superstar trumpeter Jojo Bennett, not to mention my own harmonic and hyperactive responses to the athletic, improvisational goings-on.
The range of repertoire with which we were charged made it necessary for us to be able to alternately summon the philosophical probity of Ernie’s more recent Canadian compositions, featured on our To Behold Jah album, the folky strains of Jamaican tunes like “Ride Your Donkey” and “Hill And Gully,” the nostalgic magic of his early Jamaican pop hits like “Bend Down” and “Pitta Patta,” or to serve up Rasta sentiments with renditions of “Rivers Of Babylon” or cover versions of Bob Marley’s or Burning Spear’s most cultural songs.
Roots Revival 1979: Jojo Bennett, Tony Nicholson, Paul Corby, Clive Ross, Ernie Smith and Wadi Daniel.
The choice of the band’s name came about from a merging of reggae’s status of being a “roots” music, like the blues, and “revival” events in “hot” church that suggested a similarity to the band’s evangelical performance style.
In those late 70s, the word “roots” wasn’t commonly used as a musical modifier. The Canadian outfitters by that name were still in the early stages of marketing reverse-heeled shoes. Dreadlocks were an anomaly, and the use of red gold and green was an underground flagging alert exclusively used amongst Rastas.
The Jamaican movie “Rockers” depicts an exaggerated but vivid view of the confidence and idealism of that era. Reggae culture of the time shared many points in common with the declining hippy movement – peaceful co-existence, ganja use and a communal, non-conformist rejection of “old-fashioned” opinions on race, economics and religion. The long black leather coats and mafia sunglasses uniform of the rude bwoys , dancehall “slackness” (sex talk) and gun culture had yet to arrive.
As a group, we spent months meshing our Christian/ Muslim/ Rastafarian/ Mystic points of view, rehearsing, playing in nature by taking our drums into the natural environments of forests and shorelines, scoping out the peripherally established scenes of our local Caribbean cultural community (Ishan People, Syncona, The Cougars) and preparing for a future that was being foreseen and strategized militantly by Ernie and his manager and Ryerson-educated community activist Olivia Grange-Walker.
Once our vision had been established, we began woodshedding in an isolated sector of the city where our sister band, an art-pop ensemble called The Nukes, had a rehearsal space. For days on end, afternoons and early evenings were spent jamming and recording as we broke down and consolidated the riddims and harmonies of the songs we were working on. As noted, besides the popular reggae hits of Marley, Spear and Toots, we played
Jamaican folk songs, country tunes, radio favourites, soca jams and even a couple of classical melodies, all invigorated by Clive and Wadi’s rumbles and thunderclaps.
When we got a last-minute call to open for Jimmy Cliff at the Queen Elizabeth Theater on Nov. 19, 1978, we realized that all that groundwork had been worthwhile. I had already bought a ticket to the show. When I went outside to the line-up to give mine away, it never occurred to me that “I’m with the band,” would not work as a pass for security to let me back into the venue. Our road man spotted me outside and hauled me in five
minutes before curtain.
In the Globe and Mail the next day, their business editor, Ellen Roseman, wrote, “The choice of Ernie Smith and Roots Revival to open the Cliff concert was inspired. Over the last few months, Smith and his band have knitted together. They have a deep solid sound. Smith’s new songs, especially “Show Me the Way,” take a big step forward, which, in reggae terms, is always measured in terms of the depth of one’s search. The audience demanded an encore. Cliff couldn’t have asked for a more fitting introduction.”
Paul Corby, Ernie Smith and Clive Ross at Squires, Ottawa, December 1978
Weeklong gigs followed soon after, with overflow attendance in Ottawa and Kingston drawing, amongst others, David Wilcox, Amos Garrett, Geoff Muldaur and Bruce Cockburn and his wife Kitty. They showed up to listen and dance at Squires Tavern on our final Saturday night. I have been told by a True North insider that Bruce went home and wrote his hit Wondering Where the Lions Are after hearing us that night.
Further exposure came via a spot on Peter Goddard’s short-lived TV series about Toronto club bands, where we appeared alongside Rough Trade, plus profiles in newspaper columns by Wilder Penfield and Dick Beddoes and in the SOCAN newsletter, as well as public appearances at benefits, concerts, festivals, dances, and even one symposium.
During this period, we were recording our debut album, To Behold Jah, at R.C.A. Studios downtown and at Phase One in Scarborough, overseen by “Babsy” Grange-Walker and Ernie, with Chalawa’s John Forbes and Alex King as producers, and the legendary Toronto engineer George Semkiw adding his signature sheen. Extra horns and voices were also provided by members of Jamaica’s Zap Pow band.
Radio was remarkably receptive to the two singles, “To Behold Jah,” a minor key dance rocker about mystical insights and “Don’t Down Me Now,” a plain talking but romantic relationship leveller, with an extended 45 RPM mix popular in the dance halls, adding the voices of Clive, Jojo, and “Crack of Dawn” crooner Glen Ricketts.
Although the media was unsure of what to do with a niche commodity like Canadian reggae, the need for exotic content that would fulfill the demands of that new and nefarious buzzword “multiculturalism”, powered much of the interest and curiosity that came our way.
Most audiences we confronted were experiencing their first taste of live reggae, and with all of its unfamiliar vigour, vocabulary and values, they were often unsure of how to respond. Fortunately, Ernie’s gregarious stage manner and our musicianship always won them over, along with reggae’s natural dance magnetism.
On our first night in Kingston, dating couples and whole families arrived and sat still as church mice, observing us like we were on TV.
At the end of the night, we were startled when they suddenly rose up into a standing ovation. We were back up in our rooms when the bartender knocked on the door and said, “You’d better get back downstairs. They’re still applauding.”
And that’s the way that my old boss, the great Ernie Smith, brought the tropical fire of reggae music to warm up our frozen north.
“Jah music speaks the freedom / Jah people never ready for yet…” – Freedom by Ernie Smith.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
Playlist For Corby's Orbit Show Of 15 May 2026
* Canadian Artists in Asterisk'd RED
The Mixcloud Podcast Link is RIGHT HERE
Click on images to enlarge
( Brought to you by Climax Change and Spring Loaded Tension )
5:00 A World That's So Explicit
illustration by Thierry Carrier
* Mimi O'Bonsawin + OKAN ~ Blueberry Jam ~ NEW RELEASE
* Samantha Martin & Delta Sugar ~ Love Is All Around ~ The Reckless One (2020) ~ @ Horseshoe Tavern Fri, May 29 at 08:00
* Evan Redsky ~ Red Dress ~ NEW RELEASE
* Ellen Froese ~ Closed Game ~ Solitary Songs ~ NEW RELEASE (Touring Western Canada in June)
Loreen ~ Nude
* Drake Jensen ~ Lennie Gallant's Which Way Does The River Run ~ Sideshow (2018)
* Kim Mitchell ~ Acrimony ~ Greatest Hits (1995)
* Greenhouse Ensemble ~ Variations Sur Un Turlute ~ Mezzanine ~ NEW RELEASE
* Joel Plaskett Emergency ~ Fill In The Blanks ~ NEW RELEASE
oil on wood by Jeremy Gedde
5:40 Common Phenomenators
* Daniel Lanois ~ Steel Mill ~ Belladonna ~ NEW RELEASE
* Andrew Vivona ~ It's Not What You Think ~ NEW RELEASE
Jared Mattson & Ruban Neilsen ~ American Eagle ~ NEW RELEASE
* The McDades ~ Dance Around The Spinning Wheel ~ Thread The Light ~ NEW RELEASE
John Legend & Dionne Warwick ~ Where Is Your Heart? ~ NEW RELEASE
* Barenaked Ladies ~ Here Come The Geese ~ Snacktime! (2008)
* Girma Woldemichael ~ Wrapped In Your Love ~ Nafqoté - My Longing ~ NEW RELEASE
* Allison Russell feat. Denitia & Kara Jackson ~ Cold April ~ In The Hour Of Chaos ~ NEW RELEASE
6:20 A Rage Of Emotions
* Ken Whiteley ~ Bukka White's Aberdeen ~
* Gergana Velinkova ~ Free ~ Free ~ NEW RELEASE
* Beau Nectar ~ Artichoke ~ Dandy ~ NEW RELEASE
* Desiree Dorion ~ Landmine ~ Pieces Of Me ~ NEW RELEASE
* Loviet ~ Explosure ~ NEW RELEASE
* FAUXKNOW ~ Hear This Plea ~ NEW RELEASE
illustration by Isak Hall
* Dram And A Draw ~ Living The Dream ~ NEW RELEASE
* ES:MO ~ If We Were Vampires ~ Sunshine In My Bones ~ NEW RELEASE @ Hugh's Room Live Saturday 23 May
* Lily Frost ~ More Love ~ NEW RELEASE
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