Some others among my picks, in no particular order:

The Electric Flag - Mike Bloomfield's early 1967 bid to wring out a meld of American root and native musics with horns collapsed under the weight of too many egos. They made one excellent album, then purged the man who founded the band (though it's also speculated Bloomfield's near-chronic stage fright and insomina had also gotten the better of him) plus lead singer Nick Gravenites and keyboard maven Barry Goldberg, with drummer Buddy Miles producing a second album under contract before converting what remained of the band into his own Buddy Miles Express, which had all the exuberance and none of the charming chutzpah of the Flag.

The Modern Jazz Quartet - They parted for the first time in 1974, then reunited fitfully over the years until finally making themselves a working unit again in 1987 (with the breathtaking Three Windows, a collaboration with the New York City Chamber Orchestra), staying that way until drummer Connie Kay's death. Earlier this year, guiding force/pianist/composer John Lewis went to his reward. Lewis was once of the three finest jazz composers of the post-World War II era (Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus were probably his truest rivals); the Quartet's striking style of chamber jazz (their unusual lineup: piano, vibraphone by the brilliant Milt Jackson, bass and drums) resurrected simplicity as a musical virtue amidst a genre which seemed bent on making itself too complicated for anyone to enjoy, either as a player or a listener.

Wes Montgomery - The best jazz guitarist of them all. It isn't even close. He may have been surpassed in technique, but for feeling and for improvisational dynamism, not to mention a singular sound (George Benson, for one, owes just about his entire career to Montgomery, whose style he copied almost to the letter), not to mention that he never forgot the blues (he was an excellent blues interpreter and himself wrote some interesting blues pieces, particularly "Bumpin'" and "Movin Wes, Part One") no one has come even close. Pretty good for a fellow who didn't pick up a guitar until he was married with children and was bowled over by Charlie Christian's "Solo Flight". Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968; he was 43.

Otis Redding - Kind of speaks for himself. The four albums which came forth in the wake of his death, with material he'd cut in a furious burst of creativity in the weeks before the plane crash that killed him in late 1967, tell you the man still had a world of music left to make.

J.B. Lenoir - He should be known for more than just having been John Mayall's blues idol. Hunt down his 1950s sides for Chess and Parrott. The man was in his own league as a blues songwriter and singer; not for nothing did Mayall write and record two tribue songs to him, one on his Crusade album shortly after Lenoir's early death.

Duane Allman - Also speaks for itself. He went from incandescent soul accompanist (his work out of the Muscle Shoals studios is almost as legendary as the studios themselves) to top flight group leader and guiding force; the Allman Brothers Band lost more than a singular guitarist in his death at 24. They've had their occasional moments but they've never again caught the lightning they caught when Duane Allman was in the saddle and the pocket.

Al Jackson, Jr. - The anchor of Booker T. and the MGs and all the best records that popped out of Stax/Volt in the from its birth through the early 1970s, not to mention the earlier run of classic Hi Records sides (Al Green, Ann Peebles, et. al.) in the early-to-mid 1970s. It's a crime that his 1976 murder remains unsolved.

Charlie Christian - Wes Montgomery's idol was only 22 when tuberculosis claimed him. He'd already made phenomenal music, but he was also one of the early beboppers and you wonder what would have been had he lived.

Jimmy Blanton - Like Christian, he was all but a kid when tuberculosis got him, too. He was probably the greatest bassist ever to hook up with the Duke Ellington band; to this day, people who have heard what little music came from it swear the Ellington band was at its best when Blanton was in the rhythm section. Of all who succeeded him, only the equally ill-fated Ernie Shepard in the early 1960s came even close to Blanton's harmonic and melodic sensibilities; Charles Mingus, for one, seems to have been influenced heavily by Blanton's bass style.

Robert Johnson - Need we say more?

Cyril Davies - Probably the best blues harmonica player in England in the early-to-mid 1960s. He was also the inadvertent midwife of the Rolling Stones: it was Davies who pressed his then-bandleader, Alexis Korner, to make a kid named Jagger a full band member after the kid gave an exuberant reading of Chuck Berry's "Around and Around" on an audition night. Ironic, since Davies ordinarily had no use for rocking the blues; double ironic, since Davies in due course would record a rather punchy version of the Buddy Holly song that provided the Stones their first real British hit - "Not Fade Away". Dead of leukemia before his 20s ended.

George Gershwin - Says it all.

Bunny Berigan - Drank himself to death before he was much past 30; probably the best trumpeter of the swing era, and not solely by virtue of his incandescent reading of "I Can't Get Started," either...

Cream - Broke up two years after they got together, largely because of incessant battling between bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, not to mention guitarist Eric Clapton's doubts about their direction despite their having become superstars. (To this day, Clapton swears it didn't matter whether the band was having an off night, they'd still get crowd adulation out of all proportion to the music: "I thought, we were taking their money and playing them sh@t.") They started as more or less a blues group, became practically two different bands (in the studio, they were pop experimenters as well as bluesmen; in concert, they were mostly a striking hybrid between the blues and free jazz, with the former probably keeping the latter side from going as off the wall or cacophonous as free jazz itself too often became) and also dealt with clumsy enough management. (It's now legendary how manager Robert Stigwood conveniently declined to tell Cream they'd been invited to play the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967; it's also become known that Stigwood overworked Cream - Ginger Baker swears that if they'd had a chance to go "on holiday" for a month or two in late 1967 or early 1968, the constantly-working band might have survived - while treating them as something of second class citizens while his real interest was the Bee Gees, whom he also managed. A recently published biography of Cream suggests Cream's U.S. recording rights were piggybacked on a deal between Atlantic Records and the Bee Gees.) Their freewheeling, improvisational live concerts became so much the stuff of legend and hyperbole that they inadvertently inspired only too many bands to go yard in concert whether or not they were up to Cream's level of musicianship on their best nights, but you can't really blame Cream for that. Their final album, Goodbye, showed on its studio cuts a slight shift in direction toward a more full kind of pop songcraft which might have made an intriguing direction for them if they could have survived. (They were, they've long since admitted, tempted to stay together after seeing the reaction they got at their last concert ever, at Royal Albert Hall, played almost a month after their mammoth farewell tour around the world ended.) ...just for openers.

Your turn...

Jim Croce. What a talented talented man!

Bix Beiderbeck....died at about 30 or so. OK so I'm old.

Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi, Janis, John Lee Hooker and, on the list but way down, Jim Morrison

Ronnie Van Zant, Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Stevie Ray Vaughn

I wouldn't exactly say of John Lee Hooker that he left us too soon. I mean, the man probably cut more recordings than any twenty artists combined. (This is the same reason I didn't think to put Duke Ellington on the list, by the way.) He had one hell of a run of it and we are all the more richer for it. And who knows how much unreleased material is still in the cans in various places? That's how prolific the man was. But he certainly didn't leave us emptyhanded.

Liberace......great piano player but sucked on the organ.

I'm 45 years old, friend, and I'm not exactly ready for the old folks' welfare home, either. I heard Beiderbecke while I was in high school - I had an art teacher who was such a jazz nut that he usually played jazz during our classes; in fact, that was how I got to like jazz. He had some recordings of Beiderbecke with the original Wolverines and oh what recordings, even if they sounded kind of tinny because of techniques of the time. The contrast between a hot group like the Wolverines and a cooler sound such as Beiderbecke had remains one of the most gripping in jazz. It makes you wonder why, years later, people criticised saxophone great Lester Young for playing in such a cool style amidst the heat of the Count Basie band (there were those who insisted Young should properly have copied the bristling tone of Coleman Hawkins - I'm a huge fan of Hawkins but I don't believe there is any one single proper or legitimate tone to deploy; you play what feels right and go from there; if there were only one legitimate tone for playing the trumpet, for example, there'd have been no room for, say, a Miles Davis or a Clifford Brown - another trumpeter who died too soon...)

Liberace......great piano player but sucked on the organ.

In terms of technique, he was a great pianist. But overall, the man's music was too much fancy wrapping and little real soul. I understand his appeal in the earlier television era, but there have been and are far superior classical pianists to him. Why settle for a can of Spam like Liberace when you can have prime meat like, for example, Philippe Entremont, or Glenn Gould, or Vladmir Horowitz? Liberace had his moments but he isn't even close to their league.

Allen Collins, Ronnie Van Zant, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, John Bonham, Robert Johnson. Many others.

Someone I inadvertently left off my original list...Buddy Holly...

The Burnette brothers Duke, Johnny and Dorsey. Although they were pretty much spent at the time of their deaths, who knows what might have happened later on in the 1980's when their contemporaries such as Roy Orbison were being sort of "re-discovered" and their own sons were rocking like crazy.

Another band who could be seen as dissolving before their time: the Blues Project (Danny Kalb and Steve Katz, guitars; Al Kooper, keyboards; Andy Kulberg, bass and flute; Roy Blumenfeld, drums; the band's first album, Live at Cafe Au Go Go, featured a lead singer named Tommy Flanders, who disappeared entirely after that album was issued in 1965). They cut three albums, then dissolved; bassist/flautist Andy Kulberg assembled a new lineup to finish off their recording contract with the interesting Planned Obsolescence album, before changing the band's name and cutting a few very nice albums in their own right: Seatrain.

Jim Morrison aqnd the Doors...the music NOT the antics.....

But the three who would most certainly alter or seriously affect the direction of their respective genres had the lived, were in my book Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Otis Redding. So many otehrs on our lists were long past their prime at the time of their deaths, and I include here individuals as well as ensembles.

Johnny and Dorsey Burnette had pretty much shot their wad long before their deaths. Their best work was also their least commercially successful; along with visionary guitarist Paul Burlison, the two Burnettes comprised the Rock and Roll Trio. Their music actually had more influence in England, where musicians were picking off their edgy, more blues-grounded rockabilly and Burlison's thick guitar distortion (Burlison was a huge fan of Howlin' Wolf's Sun recordings - Wolf cut them before he signed to Chess formally - and particularly of Wolf's original guitarist, Willie Johnson, who was probably the first to use proper distortion on his guitar; Burlison managed to get his own distortion sound after trying fruitlessly to figure out Johnson's sound, when he inadvertently cut a hole in a speaker cone in his amplifier). Especially influential was the Rock and Roll Trio's "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," which leavened the diet of many a rising British blues-rocker. The Rock and Roll Trio deserved better; any of their recordings is worth hunting down. Johnny Burnette, for one, deserves to be known for more than merely the execrable "You're Sixteen".

But the three who would most certainly alter or seriously affect the direction of their respective genres had the lived, were in my book Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Otis Redding.

You could say that the three probably had plenty more music in them, but you can't say they "would most certainly alter or seriously affect the direction of their respective genres..." They already had affected them, well before their untimely deaths. As also, come to think of it, had Chano Pozo, a Cuban drummer discovered and hired by Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s: it was Pozo's work with Gillespie which showed the potentials of jazz blending with Afro-Cuban and other Latinesque music styles. Pozo's work also pointed toward future strains of what came to be known as soul music, which leaned as much upon Afro-Cuban rhythm as upon other rhythmic impulses. Pozo was jumped and killed outside a New York nightclub in the 1940s.

When this thread is finished, start another one on musicians and singers that should've died sooner. It might be far more interesting!

And, of course, no such list of the prematurely departed should be permitted to go without mentioning Mike Bloomfield himself.

Hard to say, "What if," but obviously Hendrix was a great talent. He was so drugged and crazy that it isn't clear to me that even if he lived he could have produced consistently good music. (One of the things about the "Experience" was that despite Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell being average musicians, they sort of kept Jimi in touch with reality.

I also wonder if Dennis and Carl Wilson hadn't died, if Brian would still have his songwriting genius that produced "Good Vibrations" and "Pet Sounds," or if that talent left with his mental health treatments.

I saw "Cream" in Phoenix, AZ, on the last tour BEFORE the "farewell" tour. It was supposed to be a rotating stage, but the stage broke, leaving me with an all-night shot of the amplifiers and Ginger Baker's back. However, as a drummer I didn't mind, but most of the time Bruce and Clapton stood by their amps, so I barely saw them.

Finally, "Moby Grape," a late 60s band, had one of the best first albums I have ever heard. They were doing four guitars when other people struggle to make two and three work. After unexpected success of "Moby Grape," they were rushed (as so many bands were) into a second album before they were ready, and shattered.