Bob Atkinson
Nov 7 · 2 min read

The author has every right to take or leave nostalgia. But nostalgia is all about remembering carefully selected ‘good times’; it is not history where what is significant is selected from an infinite collection of past facts.

So I might be nostalgic for my grandmother’s home cooking and never having to lock your doors and all the family living nearby. I know full well my grandmother buried two of her children who as teenagers caught diseases that are preventable now. I know any friend who was homosexual would have lived with the risk of jail and blackmail. I know my family are not near to me because they have education and found satisfying work in other cities and countries. Just because things are better now doesn’t mean there were no good things in the past. And it is rational to assume that just as we look back at a time children were sent down mines as bad so will future generations look back at us and things we just take for granted now will be found evil to future eyes.

So as one of those lucky white men that Ms Moore is rolling back one word at a time I will tell you that my day dreams of the past are invariably about a foreign country and a different skin colour. Give me a time machine and I would travel back to hear the night Jabbo Smith challenged Louis Armstrong and after Louis played he was not seen again for six months and what about the night in New York when all the best pianists took on and were defeated by a young Art Tatum. And then there was Coleman Hawkins return from Europe or Bessie Smith who John Hammond said was the most talented singer he ever heard. Checkout the British Humphrey Lyttelton — in brief he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, went to Eton, was an officer in the elite Grenadier Guards and I’m sure when he died aged 87 he would have been very proud of his life — and what did he do with his life-a pale imitation of Louis Armstrong (every musician is a pale shadow of Louis).

Ms Moore may not be a jazz fan but she will be most unusual if she doesn’t retain joy with the music of her youth and isn’t that just a little slice of nostalgia?

    Bob Atkinson

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