How eclectic is your taste in music?

From Bootsy to Bartok.

I’m all over the map of genres depending on my mood. For me, I know a song is timelessly beautiful if I get that tingling down my spine. If it happens once it will happen every time. I’m getting that feeling as I type this listening to the 36 minutes version of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star on “Celebrating Jerry Garcia and the Days In Between”. I get that tingle every time I hear “shall we go, you and I while we can...throooooough the transitive nightfall of diamonds” (“Live Albums Collection”, “Live Dead” as I’ve always known it, has my favorite version, though, where the engineer is best balanced. Funny to think it was an afterthought album because they had to make a contractual obligation last minute). Sweet musical bliss. Transcendence.

I tend to go deep into certain areas that tickle my fancy. When I was a kid the electric blues led me to the rural blues, most of which was cut on 78s so I relied on 33LP transcriptions and compilations. Some electric blues from the period (Chicago; early UK on the cusp of psych) still turns me on--I’m a big fan of Kossoff, especially Free’s first album, where Guy Stevens was given free rein on the production. Subsequently, Chris Blackwell stepped in, and the band has a more produced sound.
Another area that caught my interest a few years ago was so-called "spiritual jazz" which is now very hot as a marketplace commodity-- it borders on free jazz, modal, post-bop and soul, often recorded on private or small independent labels, but the musicians are consummate players (most of them could not get work in the early ’70s once jazz was no longer a mainstream medium and worked largely as sidemen). There are some brilliant performances by some known (Cecil McBee) and unknown (Milt Ward) artists.
I also like heavy early rock, which has now been rebranded as proto-metal. It’s the stuff that coincides with early Sabbath, sometimes earlier, and anticipates heavy metal but doesn’t have shredded guitars (hate that with my carrots too) or Cookie Monster vocals. Leaf Hound’s Growers of Mushroom is probably the most famous. But there are many, many more-- bands you never heard of that had that Zepp-ish, Sabbathy, Purple-ish sound. Another famous one might be the German first pressing of Lucifier’s Friend- s/t.
I’ll listen to anything once. I’m not much for opera largely out of ignorance. I have a vast trove of high quality classical records that I rarely listen to these days, but every once in a while, I’ll pull one out.
Otherwise, it could be Eddie Hazel, or Cressida's Asylum. Go figure. 

 Amadeus to Zappa. 

+1 @michaellent