It's 1990 and the Wire is a jazz magazine. McCoy Tyner is on the cover (he's hard to arrange an interview with and when he shows up he's got nothing to say) and there are features on Kenny Barron, Carol Kidd and Mary Lou Williams. The tone is lighter than it is today, less concerned, more easy going, jokier. A gossip column is signed "The Big Cat", there are Private Eye-style editorial interjections undercutting anything too weird or sincere, the letter of the month wins a bottle of Jim Beam. It's a magazine on the sidelines, not today's venerable publication of record.

But jazz in 1990 is in trouble. Look again at those featured artists: Kidd and Barron are both in their 40s, Tyner in his 50s. Williams would have been 80. Other covers this year featured Miles (in his 60s) and Hendrix (dead). The Big Cat tells us that Kenny G has just been voted Billboard's jazz artist of the 80s, so you know things are bad. And you get the feeling the Wire realises it has to expand its horizons if it's going to survive. Perhaps the nods to classical music were always there (reviews of Feldman, Sariaaho and Satie, a Pärt premiere is mentioned, Nono's death noted), but there's also a brief "round-up of offbeat rock and more" (presumably the Merzbow LP falls under "more"), a feature on sampling ("Will Adamski replace Oscar Peterson?") and, maybe tying in with that, reviews of Christian Marclay's More Encores (his next move will be CD scratching) and John Oswald's Plunderphonics (no longer on CD since the courts have destroyed his stock, but available on cassette from ReR at cost).

The live reviews are much more prominent than they are today, and they seem especially keen to emphasise the live experience as live and unrepeatable - live as in living, a participatory event, not something you consume passively at home. This feels significant. It fits in, I suppose, with the emphasis on improvisation (improvised music will never be the same twice, recording it is arguably rather stupid), but also with the lighter tone. Perhaps to become more serious, as the Wire is now, you have to focus more on recordings. It is difficult to have serious considered opinions about something as fleeting as a live gig; but records you can study, pore over, consider and reconsider. "This was the best free improvised gig I have witnessed for years", writes Richard Scott of a Corbett/Parker/Turner show, and you realise we've no way of experiencing it now - music journalism as an act of reportage from the front line. Though in this section, too, you can see things are changing. There's Charlie Collins's Unity Orchestra at Sheffield's Merlin Theatre, but also writeups of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and, most surprisingly, Stock, Hausen and Walkman.

Still, jazz dominates. And it isn't the Wire we know now. "Wanna hear a twelve bar blues played on the musical saw? Accompanied by steel drums? And a tap dancer?" Today this wouldn't even be worth mentioning unless it was happening in Bolivia or somewhere, but the 1990 version of the Wire concludes: "No, me neither." Oh, also there are fag adverts. A different time.