‘Warm Milk and Cold Cookies’, the 9th studio album by Furtive ‘Blue’ Sammy

No one reviews jazz records. No one. I don’t care what those reviews of jazz records in the papers say, no one reviews jazz records. Reviewers merely glance at jazz records from the other side of a bar, write down their number on a small amount of paper or ‘napkin’, order two cold glasses of Cabriolet or, perhaps, a vintage sharpener of Blunder, and send their regards and the drink over, winking and glancing invitingly downwards throughout the process. When the jazz record, moodily mooding in a shadowy underneath, receives these offerings, accompanied not once, not thrice, but twice by a raised glass and a thumbs up from the hopeful, hapless, hapful reviewer across the room, the jazz record merely downs the drink, snorts the serviette like yesterday’s zigzaggy heroin-crack and slumps out of the bar to find a more happnin’ joint, a chimpanzee house, maybe, or a skip filled with old beds. No, no one reviews jazz records. “Sod off!” you vomit wastefully. “Stop making nonsense!” Jazz records, I proffer, offer, scoffer, cannot be pinned down by a hacky-cack reviewer; an effort to rationalise the milky Night Nurse duskiness of a jazz record is the same effort required to eat Mount Everest or build a fish. It cannot be achieved by the merest of mortals; we have too much sin, too few anger. Thusly, my response to Furtive ‘Blue’ Sammy’s first recorded ‘up-put’ (so-named because he sees each record as being slightly above, rather than consecutive to, the previous, and also because he has to put up with a lot) since 1968’s Blow Blow Ben is more in the vein (or aorta) of the medium of jazz itself, mimicking, nay, tickling the soft underbelly of the genre until it flips over and allows us to pull out its insides.

Listen up, now, first track, Forty-Fourth Street, Near The Bridge Bit, dreams, angers, sooths, takes cotton, wool, cotton woollen hats, pads them down on ears before grab, grabbing, grabbed, grib, grabbing them again and putting them near some hands, before right-wing saxophone soars into us and tells us how we spell ‘Marmite’, and beckons us toward second song, Hurry Lemon, leans towards the edge of the balcony, we grab its tie, we hurl it into bubbles, bubbles, bubbles not in water but in air around us and suddenly up us, it didn’t ask our permission, up us, bubbles up us, it feels better than a birthday, a re-birthday, a bubble re-birthday, then brown, sleepily, brown, brown-green, green-dance, do a green-dance, and we find ourselves, not in the third song, but the fourth song, a smarmy ditty called Dhal Monday Evening, a spicy, rickety finger-clicker of a dirge, piano in the distance but the opposite of that, then we lurch back into the third song, The Not Trot, waving at ourselves as we pass, the previous elements of the record driving into the sunrise before sending us a postcard in a week’s time, we check our watch, the record has been on for 3 hours and it’s the middle of dinner, and then blue, blue-green, green-dance on more time, and then fade, fade, up, fade, sunrise.

This record is, very simply, whatever the opposite of ‘comfort’ is. Spend the rest of your time listening to it.

You’ll like this if you like:

• Jar of Smells, by Pickin’ Perkin’ Percy

• Hold Out Your Tongue and Let Me Grab It, by Hurtin’ Hollerin’ Hop-Scotch Simpson

• No You Can’t, by Great Gummin’ Eric