Editorial Excitement

Each month, eMusic’s genre experts bring you guided tours through the best of the site’s catalogue. This month’s column aren’t all up quite yet – but most of them are, and they should hopefully provide some nice Labor Day weekend reading, if you’re so inclined.

-Kevin Whitehead talks all about why many great American jazz musicians in the ’60s went to Europe.

-John Morthland revives the tired topic of Robert Johnson to explain what made him so special. (I really enjoyed this one, as John really cuts through the myth to get at the concrete reasons that made him an innovator.)

-Richard Gehr begins the celebration of Six Degrees Records’ tenth birthday by focusing on one of his favorite records of the year: Gaudi’s Dub Qawwali.

-Lenny Kaye gets his groove on with the Daptone label, home of Sharon Jones.

-Hua Hsu lets loose on the record that some have called “Los Angeles’ version of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising” and their label, Delicious Vinyl.

-Our electronic columnist, Philip Sherburne, writes about the newly arrived Playhouse catalog, claiming that it “de-assembles and reconstructs house music’s very foundations like a kid absorbed with a set of building blocks.”

-Justin Davidson pens an ode to his pick for the “most human of all instruments”: the cello.

-Douglas Wolk recounts the career – and transformation – of Michael Gira and his groups, Swans and Angels of Light.