Great music you still haven't listened to

There is so much great (or at least important) music I still haven't heard, not even once.

Topping my list are many of the early symphonies by Mozart and Haydn, everything from the 50s by the Modern Jazz Quartet, several of the Bach cantatas, AC/DC's Black in Black, and Verdi's Rigoletto.

(Yes, this is about my Christmas list.)

How about you? What part of the great musical conversation have you never listened in on . . . yet?

 

How can I know it's great if I haven't heard it yet?

 

Is this a serious question? Are you saying that there is no way of knowing whether Beethoven's third symphony is great until you listen to it yourself? That it isn't great until YOU say so?

 

Was it great before anyone said it was? Probably, but that's Beethoven. If I haven't heard, say, one of Prince's albums, is it great? I don't know!

 

Might want to change the thread title to "(Commonly accepted) great music you still haven't listened to"

Of course there will be debate on what commonly accepted great would even be, but that's another can of worms.

 

Dylan.
Lots of Jazz.
Radiohead (they freak me out).
Lotsa Zappa.
Prog stuff (as for Yes and Rush the high pitched vocals ruin it for me).
A lot of solo Beatles stuff.

 

Nah.....I've heard everything I knowingly want to hear...

....but if I happen to stumble across something...

 

It can take time for something to be recognized as great, so I'm leaving a few things by Prince off my Christmas list at least for the time being. On the other hand MJQ has had time to earn some Michelin stars by now so it's a restaurant I don't want to miss. Same with the Haydn symphonies.

Verdict is still out on lots of stuff and my budget is small. Maybe after I get rich I can add the "maybe great" to the "definitely great" list.

 

Try to brainstorm about a Christmas list and Bam! you step on an IED!

 

Funny, I spent some time in a shop for classical music yesterday and I thought about how I still need to hear persian music, dig deeper into gregorian chants, Shostakovich, Wagner, Latin Jazz (like Cal Tjader or the Getz/Gilberto album), african music, and so on... this shop has a huge selection of world music so I spent my entire break scrolling through all those countries and styles and historical eras I still have to listen to... I'm very excited to give that a proper start one day!

 

Miles Davis. I've started to appreciate jazz more through the years, I really need to check his work out.

 

This is all about personal taste.
These are classic titles, to be sure.
What criteria are you going by?
Accepted knowledge that these are classic? Some music critic's opinion?

Here's what Frank Zappa said about music criticism and journalism:
If it sounds good to YOU, it's awesome! (I'm paraphrasing the word "awesome"...)
If it sounds BAD to YOU, it sucks!

Get on Spotify or YouTube and find out if you like the titles you mentioned,
If you do, buy 'em!

Simple.

 

I have one CD of music by the Fulani of northern Nigeria (cool polyrhythmic stuff) and CDs of two of the Shostakovich symphonies. The rest of Africa is a mystery, though, as are the other Shostakovich symphonies.

 

With 'great' I consider the majority of people who really enjoy certain artists that you didn't check out yet. In that case Chicago should be my next turn.

 

Why does this thread keep trying to go here?

 

Maybe would work better if it were about your Christmas list, without the "What about you?" part. Everyone will have a suggestion for great music you should hear.

 

Interesting question. There must be troves of impossibly obscure Blues sides from 1945 onward that are as relevant, as important to the evolution of fledgling Rock n' Roll, as anything Elvis did. The same can literally be said of Jazz, Country, R&B, Soul for sure....

Here's the thing; I am guessing that if I live to be eighty years old, and only play each song that I listen to but one time, I might be lucky if I get to hear about 1% of the total number of recordings that are worth checking out, cut between 1949 and 1979.
Since the records I enjoy listening to I tend to play repeatedly, this greatly diminishes the number of previously unheard tunes I will get to experience in my lifetime, directly proportional to the number of times I spin my favorite discs.

*edit : apologies, incomplete answer

 

I just received and listened to Klaatu's first album and forgot how amazing it was. I'm waiting for their second and third album to arrive in the mail soon....

 

While you're trying to re-insert your bowels and reattach your foot, may I suggest Kendrick Lamar's "DAMN."?

 

Way too much.

Fortunately.

 

Loads of classical music.

 

I'm still finding great '60s pop tunes on YouTube that I had never heard before this decade, like If You Ever Need Me by Margaret Mandolph, That's How Heartaches are Made by Justine 'Baby' Washington and Someone by Debbie Rollins. I keep looking for more ...

There's a lot of classical out there I haven't listened to, but it's a crapshoot. I listened to a Brucker symphony a couple of months ago and thought it was awful. But certain composers, like Schubert or Berlioz, sometimes bring it!

 

If Bruckner isn't always great, he makes up for it by being big and really really long!

 

Depends where you are surely. Here and somewhere else, different consensus. I mean, where else are you going to get a bunch of people who think that the Monkees were the greatest musical achievement of the 20th century? Why wait to find out what everyone else thinks?

 

the road is long, with many a winding turn

in the meantime, enjoy every sandwich