Imprinting instrumental music with meaning is a constant jazz conundrum. Whether solved by knowledge of players' characters or their songs' suggestive titles, pure abstraction is rarely enough. London-based Mancunian Sam Rapley presents his debut album as a fiction anthology, complete with two short stories inspired by its music. With this encouraging nudge, distinct narrative threads inevitably emerge. ‘25 Years of Rain’ is a magical realist saga or maybe holiday soap opera at nineand-a-half minutes, leaving room for Rapley's sinuous sax to give way to Alex Munk's rock-style guitar and Matt Robinson's impressionistic piano. ‘H.G.’ has a suburban mentality, before a burst of urban bustle and Rapley's net-curtaintwitching, inquisitive clarinet pecks. ‘First Love, Last Rites’ offers showier emotions, led by blowsy guitar. The narratives are more than affectation, as Rapley shapes his tunes with traditional virtues of beginning, middle and end, and genuine, if shallow, subtext and psychology. These are vignettes from comfortably satisfied streets, rarely more than wistful in their emotional span. Some pulp fury would be welcome in their polite English pages, but the craft is always solid.