Pour yourself a long slow one, sit back and enjoy. If ever that old jazz cliché about the parts being greater than the whole meant anything, then savour this first coming together of Jordan with those long-time pals Clarvis and Noble. The latter pair of course, have a long heritage of fruitful collaboration with stellar singers, the former with Mose Allison and Nina Simone, the latter with Christine Tobin, another Irish singer who melds jazz, folk and poetry in magical ways.

Cathy Jordan can't simply be boxed as a ‘traditional’ Irish singer, despite her decades with the likes of Dervish, as her voice, with its range of dynamics from intimate whisper to empassioned yowl, easily transcends limiting notions of genre or region.

The tone is set by the opening ‘Dear Someone’; if it knocks you back to hear Noble playing a tipsy waltz as if he's found a pub joanna by a roaring fire at the start of a delirious lock in, it's also a moment when music suddenly means more than just the notes that are played; it's about frailty, fun and intimacy. The mood's picked up by a breezy title track, which would doubtless have made Libba Cotton grin, but then we handbrake turn, emotionally, to Cash's dark ‘The Beast in Me’. And if ‘Truly Scrumptious’ is meant to be an airy counterpoint to that, where did that crazed synth solo come from? Ironically, the outstanding cut doesn't feature a vocal; a time-stood-still take on Bernstein's ‘Somewhere’, all decaying chords, it leaves us wondering if we’ll ever find a ‘new way of living, a new way of giving.’ Pour us another one…