Jazz is a new thing for me, and one that is so obvious for a man to get into in his forties, that one friend told me I’d be wearing Lycra next. Make no mistake, if I were more svelte, I would never leave the house without being fully aerodynamic, but there’s only room for one cycle-wear fetishist in this shop.

I’d tried to get into Jazz loads of times. First was in my late teens at university. I was at a house party, and someone with a Mancunian accent that would give Liam a three-parka handicap was gobbing-off in the kitchen. His name was Colin and, after a quick postcode check, it turned out he was not from Manchester at all. But he befriended me, and brought round to my house a variety of music he referred to as, ‘hard Mexican shit’.

It put me off for a while, I won’t lie. There was, of course, the bits and pieces sampled on hip hop records, Larry Heard, or drum and bass going full polo-neck for a bit in the mid-to-late 90s, but apart from that and maybe The Style Council, my collection was a Jazz-free-zone.

It was the loose but formidable collective of musicians centred around south-east London of which Shabaka Hutchings seemed to be some kind of conduit, that actually got me enjoying Jazz for the first time. I’d recently dipped into some of the wilder stuff Pharaoh Sanders did, and listened as I might do to heavy psychedelic music, but it was the Brownswood ‘We Out Here’ compilation that was a way into Jazz for me; in the same way the Blood & Fire samplers in the 90s opened up the world of dub to a dilletante, or Soul Jazz’s Tropicalia collection started an obsession, that continues to this day, with making up Portuguese words.

The list of artists on ‘We Out Here’ is insane to read nowadays: Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Kokoroko, Shabaka Hutchings, Ezra Collective, Theon Cross – whose Fyah album is an underrated gem – Jon Armon Jones… It’s ridiculous to think all that was bubbling under till then, and next thing The Comet is Coming were chanting ‘it’s the end of the world and my mind won’t stop!’ on national television.

This was body music, soundsytem music. Until then, I’d thought of Jazz as an aesthetic to appreciate, or a puzzle to solve, when I should’ve been thinking about Jazz as something I love: dance music.

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? But I think people miss that a lot of Jazz is deeply funky shit. One such record is Idris Muhammad’s ‘Black Rhythm Revolution,’ (Prestige, 1971), where you can shamelessly feast on the foundational texts of sample-culture and ignore any snobs who try to tell you not to.

These are monumental breaks. There’s still plenty of time for farting around, but ultimately, if you don’t want to hear Idris Muhammad and Harold Mabern duke it out over Express Yourself and Superbad, you’re the type who’d go back to work after you’d won the lottery. These people, my father believes, should have to give the money back; and I agree.

The same goes for people who don’t like Lou Donaldson, an assertion I feel confident in making despite having never heard of Lou Donaldson until I played Midnight Creeper (Blue Note 1968), this week. But I trust most Lous – Macari, Carpenter, Diamond-Phillips – so I thought I’d give it a go.

I listened to it without knowing Idris Muhammad is the drummer on this too, going by Leo Morris at the time; but he’s still up against Lonnie Smith and George Benson for names even non-jazz heads have heard of; and there are moments, such as Benson’s playing on Elizabeth – a song that slow-dances the line between sophisticated heartache and cocktail cheese with a grace and swagger Bryan Ferry could only dream of – where you hear the beginnings of something that has become synonymous; and it’s gorgeous.

Midnight Creeper is a sexy record. The cover is sexy. It’s fun. You’d keep an eye on this record if you invited it to a family do. But more than anything it is funky – the type that would make Ad-Rock blaspheme. Lonnie Smith’s organ tip-toes quickly away from the scene of something naughty, and in the next track acts as pure rhythm, carving out the type of relentless stabs that wouldn’t sound out of place on Basic Channel. And as for Lou Donaldson, his tenor sax is like watching Carlos Valderrama in his prime – strolling around, capable of magic, but probably thinking about something really normal. My type of player.