The trouble with "top 10" lists

From an email to a friend:

I believe we’ve talked about the silliness of top ten lists and the like. Musical accomplishment is too multidimensional to admit of any sensible linear ordering.

This list of trumpeters illustrates the problem nicely. All 10 are excellent and each has a permanent place in the history of jazz. But the ordering is somewhat arbitrary. I’m sure the guy who did the list could justify it. Heck, I could justify it if it came to that. But why should it come to that?

I rather suspect that Armstrong is first in the list because he was the first major trumpet soloist in jazz. But it’s not like being older than the others is some kind of personal or artistic accomplishment. It just happened. If you set that aside and think of whatever the hell the dimensions of artistic excellence are, it’s not clear to me that he belongs first.

But being first does have one very important effect: You get to influence everyone else. What does that have to do with excellence, however? And THAT’s a real question, for which I can’t offer an easy answer. It’s certainly important in the evolution of the system. Still, it seems to me that excellence is one thing, temporal priority another.

I could see perhaps dividing the list in two, with Armstrong, Gillespie, and Davis in one group and the rest in another group. I might almost be willing to take a crack at justifying that. But not much more.

And even then, what about Beiderbecke, who’s 9th on the list, I believe. He had a distinctly different style from the others, a simpler and more lyric style. That’s worth something. Alas, he died young, perhaps if he’d lived to 40 or 50 or, who knows, 70, he might have accomplished a lot more. But then Clifford Brown died in a car crash in his mid-20s, Fats Navarro didn’t make it to 30 (TB and heroin), and Lee Morgan was shot by his girlfriend in his mid-30s. There’s a lot of “if only this or that did or didn’t happen” in this world. Are we to take that into account? It seems to me that if you’re at the point where you’re trying to wrestle with that, you’re probably trying for more precision than is sensible.