For this year’s list, we organize everything by category.

Music 45 2023: Who Keeps Chicago In Tune introduction
Music 45 2023: The Record Makers
Music 45 2023: The Venues
Music 45 2023: The Programmers
Music 45 2023: The Performers
Music 45 2023: The Educators and Supporters

Jerry Bryant and Greg Corner/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Jerry Bryant and Greg Corner
Creator/Executive Producer and Music Director, Co-Hosts, JBTV
Jerry Bryant credits music with saving his life, after a near-death experience with stage IV colon and lung cancer in 2016. JBTV will celebrate forty years of broadcasting music videos, interviews and live performances in 2024. (The program is shown on CAN-TV Channel 19 in Chicago or via YouTube at jbtvmusic.com.) There’s also JBTV the Podcast, collecting his interviews (or conversations, as he likes to call them) and now a book penned by Bryant himself. “I got a bunch of pictures and stuff in there and tell some of the stories that JBTV’s gone through in my career,” Bryant says. He and his music director since 2012, Greg Corner (formerly of frequent guests Kill Hannah), promise a return to new shows at a new location, the Preston Bradley Center in Uptown in the first quarter of 2024, to commemorate their forty-year anniversary. (Craig Bechtel)

Ayana Contreras/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Ayana Contreras
Host, “Reclaimed Soul” WBEZ and  Author, “Energy Never Dies”
Ayana Contreras left Chicago Public Media last month and her position as music director and director of content at Vocalo Radio 91.1FM, the country’s first urban alternative station, to become assistant general manager at Rocky Mountain Public Media’s UA-formatted The Drop and its jazz station KUVO in Denver. Contreras says it was a difficult decision, as “everything I’ve done up until now has been built around Chicago culture. But at the same time,” she says, it’s a “great opportunity to help expand some of the things that we created at Vocalo on a national platform.” She’s not leaving Chicago; she will live in both cities and continue both hosting “Reclaimed Soul” on WBEZ and working on expanding access to the DJ booth at the 95th Street Red Line CTA stop. Her book, “Energy Never Dies,” was published in 2021 and she’s working on her next, about Black culture and history. (Craig Bechtel)

The Media
Hall of Fame

Andrew Barber
Founder, Fake Shore Drive

Seth Boustead
Founder/Executive Director, Access Contemporary Music and Host, “Relevant Tones”

Shawn Campbell
Founder/GM, CHIRP Radio

John Corbett
Writer, Producer and Co-Founder, Corbett vs. Dempsey

Lawrence Johnson
Founder, Chicago Classical Review and American Music Project

Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis
Co-Hosts, “Sound Opinions”