I am a huge music slut, so much of what I'll post about will be music-related. Here's my first offering in that vein:

Top 5 Jazz Artists

5. John Coltrane
4. Dave Brubeck
3. Charles Mingus
2. Django Reinhardt
1. Miles Davis

I'm not a Jazz expert by any means, but in the past few years my appreciation for it has greatly expanded. It all started with Miles Davis (it actually all started with the movie Swing Kids), and I doubt he will ever be displaced from my number one spot. Now I love The Grateful Dead, but they were more about the message and the experience. I love the Beatles, but I still think they're pretty overrated. I love The Velvet Underground, but they burned brightly and also shortly. And I love Bob Dylan to an unhealthy degree, and I think that for a short time in the sixties he transcended the title "musician", but besides those inspired few years his musicianship is really just standard 'above average'. So I would label Miles as the greatest pure musician of the 20th century. His duration, his variance, and his skill outmatched pretty much everyone.


Top 5 Blues Artists

5. Charley Patton
4. Robert Johnson
3. Lucille Bogan
2. Blind Willie Johnson
1. Mississippi John Hurt

I don't claim to be a great Blues expert, either, but I am a Blues purist. As soon as Blues became a genre of music rather than a way of life, I feel that the entire enterprise lost its impact. The reason the music was so powerful was because many or most of the artists were blind men living on the streets for whom music was their only way of staying alive or they were nomads whose chief way of living was going from bar to bar or they were dirt poor sharecroppers who escaped from the grind of life through their music. They didn't choose to be Blues musicians; their lives and their music gave birth to the Blues as we know it.