Alt. Takes Archives - Jazz Journal

Alt. takes 06/20

Brian Morton — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 18:13:43 +0000

I’ve been teaching Latin to my homeschooled son and he’s been helping me cut wood. Quid pro quo. Actually I give him more than a quid. It’s surprising how little you can get for one of those these days. Almost as worthless as Latin. Having the language in mind proved unexpectedly relevant this week. I […]

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Alt. takes 05/20

Brian Morton — Thu, 14 May 2020 13:40:28 +0000

One informal theme of this recently rather irregular column – for which, apologies – is misremembering or sometimes downright forgetting. I’ve recently been involved in a wholesale audit and reorganisation of the LP archive, mindful of the splendid Mats Gustafsson’s mantra to the effect that a vinyl a day keeps the doctor away, more than […]

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Alt. takes 02/20

Brian Morton — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 11:25:49 +0000

Tinnitus, the Times headline shouted, can affect mental health. And this is news? As with so much else in the dead-tree press these days, the story was a mix of shaky science and the blindingly bleeding obvious, but I predict that once “bad back” and “stress” lose their conviction on absence notes, tinnitus will be […]

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Alt. takes 12/19

Brian Morton — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 13:32:51 +0000

Been a bit out of action for the last umpty-um weeks with a condition that at first looked a bit hairy but has more recently been declared to be lifelong rather than life-threatening. Or as one of the medics said, “You’ll probably die with it, rather than of it”. Which is nice. ‘The hell of […]

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Alt. takes 09/19

Brian Morton — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 12:12:59 +0000

Been a while. For which, apologies. Health. Family. “Stuff”. Plus a certain amount of what the Catholic Church calls “discernment”, which basically means looking around, and more scarily, looking within, to see what the next step ought to be. The health matter was very nearly settled for good by the collapse at my very elbow […]

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Alt. takes 02/19

Brian Morton — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 10:58:48 +0000

You know that thing when your desk gets so cluttered that if you slide something more onto the front something falls off the back with a clunk. I sometimes sense that reputations are like that. Some hot new exponent comes on the scene and doink a previously admired artist slips out of view. So torrential […]

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Alt. takes 01/19

Brian Morton — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 13:52:30 +0000

It’s me, speaking from another dimension . . . I was talking to a colleague a week or so back, about the great change that Jazz Journal has undergone and about the status of writing online. We had the usual slightly geeky exchange, the kind of thing that is only of interest to fellow-exponents, like […]

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