Influential Artists
Since I’m often asked this question, I’m going to be lazy and publish answers I posted on the bonkwave forum a while back:
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In clumps:
The Beatles, Harry Nilsson
Prokofiev, Schubert, Erik Satie
Emerson, Lake and Palmer (I was young, but it did open my ears to some stuff)
Weird Belgian bands I used to be friends with (Aksak Maboul, COS...)
Tuxedomoon, The Residents, Snakefinger, Renaldo and the Loaf...
Kurt Weill (my all-time musical songwriting hero), Carla Bley, Nino Rota
Bernard Herrmann, John Barry
Robert Wyatt, early Gong, Magma
Talking Heads, B 52s, XTC, and other post-punk bands (Siouxie, Ian Dury, Madness, others...)
Kraftwerk, Gary Numan
Philip Glass, John Adams, Laurie Anderson
All of Zappa up to the mid to late 70s, Albert Marcœur
French singer-songwriters (Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Nino Ferrer, Georges Brassens, Richard Gotainer, a few more...)
Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds
Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli
That's it for the early years 😅
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I came to jazz much later (via fusion bands at first, and probably thanks to Zappa also). My dad listened to a lot of scratchy old blues records, which I should have included in my list, because one thing that puts me off a lot of mainstream music, is the total absence of blue notes (or even slightly weird non-diatonic or extended chords) 😅
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I mentioned Prokofiev in my list because my earliest musical memory is hearing the famous dance of the knights from Romeo and Juliet on the radio and my brain exploding. Just thinking about that piece gives me goosebumps. And looking at my list again, every artist I mentioned has tracks that give me goosebumps just by thinking of them! 🪿
Also in elementary school (in France), I had a music teacher who taught us a series of original songs, each one about an animal. And once we all knew our songs really well, he had us sing them at the same time, and they all fit together forming counterpoints and harmonies and canons, and my head exploded again, and I think that this influenced me more than anything else. In fact, I still remember the melody and lyrics of my song (the hippopotamus 😄) 50 years later! 🦛
These are my main influences. I obviously listened to a lot more stuff over the years. People often ask me if I was influenced by The Divine Comedy for instance, which is very flattering, but no, because I discovered them rather late in life. Similarly, I would bring the entire Cardiacs discography to my desert island, but I only discovered them a few short years ago (not that my music bears any resemblance to them, unfortunately).
And today, through my involvement with NHAM and The Indie Beat Television, I mostly listen to artists from the fediverse!