Queen

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• Top 6 Rock Musicians of All Time

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• The Beatles

  The Beatles' February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew an estimated 73 million American television viewers, one of the largest audiences in US television history at the time, and is widely credited with launching the "British Invasion" that reshaped American popular music for the rest of the decade. The band's studio evolution across just seven years of recording — from the straightforward pop of their early singles to the layered studio experimentation of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road — is still cited by music historians as one of the fastest and most consequential artistic developments in popular music history, redefining what a rock album could sound like and accomplish. The Beatles hold the record for most number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 of any artist, and their catalog, largely written by the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, remains one of the most commercially successful and critically studied bodies of work in the history of recorded music. Their 1970 breakup, driven by a mix of business disputes, creative differences, and the individual members' desires to pursue solo work, ended the group at the height of its influence, and the sustained commercial and critical reverence for their catalog in the decades since has kept them the most frequently cited "greatest band of all time" in music polls worldwide.

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• Led Zeppelin

  Led Zeppelin formed in 1968 out of the ashes of the Yardbirds, and across four founding members — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham — built a catalog that fused blues, folk, and hard rock into a sound that became foundational to the development of heavy metal and hard rock as genres in their own right. The band's fourth album, released untitled in 1971 and commonly called "Led Zeppelin IV," contains "Stairway to Heaven," one of the most played rock radio songs in history, and the album itself has sold more than 37 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums ever recorded. Led Zeppelin built their reputation as much through legendary live performances as studio recordings, and drummer John Bonham's death in 1980 led the surviving members to disband the group immediately rather than continue with a replacement, a decision that's kept their catalog frozen at four members' worth of work rather than diluted by a lineup change. The band's influence on the development of hard rock and heavy metal is difficult to overstate — Page's guitar work and production techniques, Bonham's drumming, and Plant's vocal range collectively set a technical and stylistic bar that shaped how an entire generation of rock musicians approached the genre after them.

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• The Rolling Stones

  The Rolling Stones formed in London in 1962 and have remained active, in some form, for more than six decades, a level of career longevity unmatched by any other major rock band, still touring and releasing new material well into the 2020s with founding members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards still at the group's core. The band built its early identity in deliberate contrast to the Beatles' cleaner, more polished image, cultivating a raw, blues-rooted sound and a rebellious public persona that music journalists at the time framed as a direct rivalry, even as the two bands' members were often genuinely friendly off stage. Songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," "Gimme Shelter," and "Sympathy for the Devil" became defining anthems of 1960s and '70s rock, and the band's ongoing "Voodoo Lounge" and subsequent world tours have repeatedly ranked among the highest-grossing concert tours in music history well into their own seventies and eighties. The band's survival through numerous lineup changes, including guitarist Brian Jones's 1969 death and Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood's subsequent tenures, along with Jagger and Richards's famously turbulent but enduring creative partnership, has made the Rolling Stones the standard against which any band's career longevity in rock music is measured.

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• Jimi Hendrix

  Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 1969 Woodstock festival, played on an overdriven electric guitar to evoke the sounds of bombs and gunfire during the Vietnam War, is remembered as one of the most politically and musically significant performances in rock history. Hendrix's technical innovations on the electric guitar — pioneering the deliberate use of feedback, distortion, and the wah-wah pedal as expressive musical tools rather than accidents to be avoided — fundamentally expanded what the instrument was capable of and directly influenced virtually every major rock guitarist who came after him. His recording career lasted barely four years before his death in 1970 at 27, joining the so-called "27 Club" of prominent musicians who died at that age, yet in that brief span he released three studio albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland, that remain foundational texts for rock guitar playing. Hendrix's combination of technical innovation, showmanship, and a genre-blending sound that drew on blues, R&B, and psychedelic rock simultaneously has made him the guitarist most frequently ranked first on "greatest guitarist" lists across the music industry, more than five decades after his death.

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• Pink Floyd

  Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon spent an astonishing 741 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart, a run of chart longevity unmatched by any other album in history, and its themes exploring mental illness, mortality, and the pressures of modern life gave progressive rock a new level of conceptual ambition. The band pioneered the elaborate concept album format, in which an entire record is built around a unified narrative or thematic idea rather than a collection of individual singles, most notably on 1979's The Wall, a double album later adapted into a feature film exploring isolation, trauma, and the psychological toll of fame. Pink Floyd's live shows became famous for elaborate visual and technical production — inflatable pigs floating over stadium crowds, massive circular screens, and, for The Wall tour, an actual brick wall built and torn down on stage across the performance — setting new standards for what a rock concert's production values could achieve. Internal tensions, particularly between bassist and primary lyricist Roger Waters and the rest of the band, led to Waters's departure in the mid-1980s and years of legal disputes over the band's name and material, but Pink Floyd's studio catalog from the 1970s remains one of the most influential and structurally ambitious in the history of rock music.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.