Sure, there have been other jazz prodigies: Bix, Buddy Rich, Mary Lou Williams, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, to name but a gloveful. But few have made such a splash as 11-year-old Bobby Darius. The exclamative title quote comes from bandleader Bennett Mungson, who caught a set by the boy wonder at The Peppermint Parlour, a daycare facility in downtown Cleveland, when the kid was just four (although the words “obnoxious”, “little” and “asshole” didn’t make it as far as the cover). To be fair to the mite, he really didn’t stand a chance, for Bobby’s pushy parents were the toxic pairing of Janetta Strunff (former off-Strip Vegas showgirl (“she’s so off-Strip she’s virtually in Utah”) and Melvin Darius (ex-balloon-folder-turned-office-furniture-salesman). The Brady Bunch they weren’t – although photographs of the Darius family show that there was enough Colgate and Crimplene going on for the trio to bear a passable resemblance to those TV titans. Anyway, to the matter in hand: the teeny tickler’s debut album opens disastrously with Darius attempting to upstage his rhythm section by injecting Rachmaninov into the 1971 Sammy Davis Jr. hit ‘The Candy Man’. This is followed by a version of Peter, Paul & Mary’s ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ that manages to give schmaltz a bad name. By this stage, in-studio relations were clearly becoming strained as Breslin stops playing altogether after the first chorus and Armitage starts dropping bombs all over the place. Darius can be heard whining, “The guys are playing real bad, mommy! They’re real bad players! Get me some good players!”. Things then calm down for a ‘Hello Dolly’ that is given perversely leaden treatment (the band may be playin’, but that room sure ain’t swayin’) and ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ deliquesces unpleasantly. Things conclude with the only original on the date, Darius’s ‘Bobby’s Boppin’ and the Cats are Hoppin’’. He isn’t and they aren’t.