Roy’s post about Maynard Ferguson, one of the lesser-known (outside of the jazz world) jazz greats, leads to an obvious arts topic for this Friday. Who are your favorite underappreciated/underrated artists?

My absolute favorite singer/songwriter is Billy Bragg, the English socialist troubador who rarely gets any US airplay, though some big-city alternative and college stations did play him a bit in what you might call his heyday. Yeah, he’s a screaming socialist protest singer. His political lyrics are laughably naive. He once did a whole album of socialist work songs. But his songwriting is stellar, his playing highly skilled yet seething with raw emotion, his singing instantly gripping and moving, and his lyrical wordplay more clever and interesting than any other singer’s today. He was best described as a cross between Woody Guthrie and The Clash. No doubt his political activism has hurt his marketability, though he actually has more ballads and love songs than protest songs. But alas, there is little room on mainstream commercial radio for electric folk-punk, so his brilliant songs go unheard by the masses, ironically the very ones he’s trying to reach.

In film, NC School of the Arts grad David Gordon Green, appreciated by the critics, is an exceptional director more skilled than others whose names are better known, as is Hong Kong director Kar Wai Wong. They could make a documentary on dog food entertaining.