Perhaps not everyone has had a truly "life-changing" musical experience, but there certainly is such a thing.

Jerry Rasmussen started a great thread a while back called "Music That Blew Me Away." Rather than repeat my rather long story, here's a link to what I posted back then:

thread.cfm?threadid=76587#1359093

(I'd recommend reading through the whole thread, not just my contribution...)

I've had some other important musical experiences since then, maybe about one per decade. Some of them grew out of moving to New Orleans about 38 years ago. I would second Texas Guest's endorsement of traditional New Orleans jazz as an underappreciated and truly joyful musical genre, and would hasten to add that today's living tradition of New Orleans music, which includes elements of rhythm-&-blues/rock-&-roll as well as a bit of contemporary-jazz influence, is even more unknown to the outside world than that old-time "dixieland," and (as a physically moving, funky, dance/boogie genre) is really a truer "descendant" of early jazz than the laid-back, cerebral, and relatively inaccessible music that is generally classified as jazz today.

Listen to Professor Longhair, if you get a chance, to hear what I'm talking about. 'Fess is hardly "contemporary" (he died in 1980), but the sound he created is still tremendously influential today...