EMusic

John Morthland, who lives in Austin, is currently a writer at large for Texas Monthly and a regular contributor to various other music and general-interest publications, both print and online. He has been an associate editor of Rolling Stone and editor of Creem, and has contributed to virtually every music magazine of the past three decades; he has also written liner notes for several hundred albums and has contributed to numerous non-music daily, weekly, monthly and online publications. He is the author of The Best of Country Music (Doubleday, 1984) and the editor of Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (Random House, 2003). He is also the music consultant for the River Music Experience, a museum of Mississippi River music in Davenport, Iowa.

Justin Davidson, Newsday's classical music critic, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2002. A native of Rome, Davidson worked as a stringer at the Rome bureau of the Associated Press before coming to the US to attend Harvard as a music major. While in college, he worked as a stringer for the Associated Press Boston bureau, studied classical guitar and began a career as a composer. After spending a year on a music fellowship in Paris, Davidson moved to New York City to pursue a doctoral degree in music composition at Columbia University, where he also was instructor and later adjunct professor of music. His compositions, which have been performed in the US, Italy, China and Eastern Europe, have won him grants and awards from the American Academy/ Institute of Arts and Letters, the Mellon Foundation, Meet the Composer, Columbia University and the Fondation des Etats-unis in Paris. He joined the staff of Newsday in 1996. In 2003, he added a second beat to his brief, becoming the paper's first architecture critic.

Kevin Whitehead is jazz critic for National Public Radio's daily show Fresh Air. His writings on music have appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, the Village Voice, CD Review, Down Beat, the Absolute Sound and many other publications. In the '90s Whitehead spent four years in Amsterdam, where he wrote New Dutch Swing (Billboard Books), a study of improvised music in that city, and edited the oral history Bimhuis 25: Stories of Twenty-Five Years at the Bimhuis. Other books to which he's contributed include the Cartoon Music Book (2002), Jazz: The First Century (2000), the Gramophone Jazz Good CD Guide (1995, 1997) and Mixtery: a Festschrift for Anthony Braxton (1995). Whitehead is an editorial advisor and contributor to the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a member of the improvising band Starship Beer, heard on the CD Nut Music 1976-88 (Atavistic).