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>>How can you call that crap (g) music?
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>>Real music is Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi, etc...
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>Ugh, Beethoven is depressing. And I'd rather go to the dentist than listen to J.S. Bach.
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>Now, I like Franz Liszt, Edvard Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Chopin - much of their music is adventurous.
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>I really have not listened to enough Mozart to say anything either way.

But remember, when Bach played Bach it was jazz. <s> Baroque music is just noodling on chord progressions and changes, just inside a tighter structure and not using some of the coolest stuff - the flat threes and fives and augmented chords. But listen to Brubeck's Bach stuff and you'll hear how it connects. That was improv, working charts. A lot of great music built on that. Miles and Coltrane and MJQ and Biederbeck and Teagarden and Brubeck and Desmond and all those guys built on that.

Lots of good jazz musicians really like to riff on Baroque stuff.

Picasso was a great artist who did what he did not because he couldn't draw (his realism is amazing). Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Brubeck all those guys could play straight with great understanding.

Gospel was another big jumping off point. The "devil's notes" were the blue notes and Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, T Bone Walker, Professer Longhair and all music that came up the Mississippi to Chicago was in church on Sunday, but The Devil's music on Saturday night. There are some guys around now like Ralph Sutton who can play the whorehouse piano that was a foundation for jazz and Dr. John who channels Prof Longhair. When a genius like Ellington or Strayhorn had both blues and classical to work with we got some of the greatest music ever written.

There is so much great music it is kind of sad that so much attention and adulation goes to the silliness that is the pop flavor of the week which has more to do with pr than with music.

"They bow down before charlatans and let their poets starve."

(oh, and Mozart was sort of the Bop of Baroque <g> )