Happy Hour is, in notable part, jump blues, the proximate cause of rock 'n' roll, which long ago dumbed down the lyrics and reduced the singers' ages to their teen years. The music, of course, was great fun, and a good part of that fun was in bewildering and/or pissing off middle-class white parents and all who remained from previous generations, most of whom swore through their ignorance that no such noise had ever sounded outside Africa. (No surprise, racism was integral to the rejection.) But jump blues, popular in African America in the 1940s, gave previous iterations of blues, both rural and urban, a good kick in the pants.

Blues has never been short of humor -- contrary to the common impression of persons who don't listen to it -- but the jump variety was and remains even funnier than the others.

The Bay Area's Mitch Woods and his band the Rocket 88s perform the blues at its most joyous. Though they don't sound much like the high-volume, rock-centric outfits that crowd the blues mainstream these days, they don't come across as dusty archivists either. They just love the music, and in their more than capable treatment it feels effectively ageless. It doesn't have to answer to time or fashion; it just is, and that isn't easy to pull off. It is what music should be, though.

On top of that, Happy Hour's contents consist of 13 originals indistinct from older materials. In other words, Woods speaks the language more than metaphorically. The opener ("Jukebox Drive") made me laugh out loud: an old-fashioned hot-rod rocker that suddenly turns into a comic song about flying saucers, a subject close to my heart as the author of a multi-volume (the latest to be released any moment now) social history of the UFO controversy. I have not the least doubt that Billy Lee Riley's rockabilly freakout "Flyin' Saucer Rock'n'roll" (1957) sits atop the list of inspirations.

From there Woods cooks up one delicious treat after another, integrating the elements of jump blues -- boogie woogie, jazz, r&b, honkytonk and saloon soundtrack, even a mambo celebration and a Professor Longhair send-up -- and swings them dizzyingly until the listener's consciousness has been altered out of all remaining ties with the real world. Here and there Woods and company slow down the pace, but never for long. Though the 13 cuts are broadly consistent in their approach to popular music, each boasts its own character and personality, and each good-naturedly demands that attention be paid.

I reviewed Woods' previous album, Friends Along the Way, in this space on 26 August 2023. The friends on that disc encompass no less than Taj Mahal, Maria Muldaur, Charlie Musselwhite, Van Morrison, Kenny Neal, Joe Louis Walker, Elvin Bishop and John Hammond -- in other words some of the most respected figures to reign over the past decades of American roots-based music. If they think Mitch Woods, who is younger than any of them, is welcome in their ranks, maybe you ought to be listening, too.