Jazz isn't dead. It's the name of a new small car from Honda, which has emblazoned the word in chrome on the boot, with a cheeky red dot above the j. In Japan, where it merrily competes for ubiquity with the Toyota Yaris, the Jazz is known as the Honda Fit. Clearly that would have carried some unfortunate resonances among UK shoppers. So Jazz it is.
Then again, the word jazz can carry some pretty unfortunate resonances, too, and in any language. What kind of jazz is the Jazz? A heart-liftingly liquid piano phrase? A tone-deaf sax break? An interminable drum solo? Are we talking Jazz, as in Charlie Parker? Or Jazz, as in Kenny G?
It's certainly possible at first to wonder whether you have come to the right gig. From the outside, very little about the car sets the spirit soaring - even in the colour mine came in, a wild and crazy, static-to-the-touch electric green. (Less radioactive tones are available.) The Jazz is a fairly typical modern blob-shape, with big friendly headlamps and a panoramic windscreen and no rebellious lines or threatening ridges.
Of course, this mildly anonymous look could work in its favour. Not everybody wants a car that leaps out in the crowd, certainly not in the present climate. Even when painted to resemble an irradiated courgette, the Jazz does not advertise itself in any especially overt way, which must diminish your chances, as its owner, of being dragged from behind the steering wheel by car jackers.
Car jackers, one has to say, seem drearily badge-ist in their approach to motoring pleasure, tending to cling timidly to a narrow band of approved marques - Audis, BMWs, Mercs, Saabs - and thus never experiencing the full diversity of the contemporary marketplace, nor coming to appreciate the value for money which is out there right now for the prudent purchaser.
More fool the jackers, as they would discover if they only took the trouble to investigate the Jazz's startlingly roomy and smartly innovative interior. The Jazz manages that time-honoured but hard-to-pull-off stunt, the Tardis effect, being approxi mately five times roomier on the inside than it appears to be from the outside, and considerably less stuffed than the Tardis with bogus consoles and flashing lights.
From without, you would be convinced that this was the kind of supermini in which even the driver was going to have to get used to sitting with his knees in his nose and in which the rear passengers could scrap for their share of a space roughly the size of cereal packet.
In fact, though no one could pretend there was width and length enough in the Jazz to run a Pilates class, everyone does at least get to sit in something like the comfort of a hatchback from the next car group up, thanks principally to a piece of canny juggling by Honda which has landed the petrol tank under the front seats and freed up some floor space in the back.
This further enables Honda to supply what they refer to as a "Magic Seat", or rather a pair of them. Not to be confused in any way with a flying carpet, these are back seats which fold down flat like everybody else's but which also, uniquely, tip up, freeing the area that would normally be occupied by the rear passengers' backsides and legs. Thus, that business of putting things in the back of the car which won't fit in the boot becomes achievable by practical means, rather than by simply opening the back door and pushing very hard until they squeeze in over the seat cushions.
Incidentally, the tip-up mechanism on those rear seats has nothing in common with the tip-up mechanism favoured in cinemas which, one can see, would not have taken to the road particularly well. Up, down, or flat, the seats lock firmly into their selected positions, and without one's having to hang up one's coat, roll up one's sleeves and wrestle them into place in a flurry of violent cursing.
Honda estimates that, with the back seats down, the Jazz will take a mountain bike "with the front wheel off". One warms to this method for calculating space. My own estimate, on this principle, is that you could stow a Lamborghini Murcielago in there, as long as you removed everything except its tyres.
If you ever stop playing with the seats for long enough to drive the car, you will discover that it comes with a 1.4-litre engine which, though disappointingly uncompetitive at traffic lights and in urban chicane situations, and though given to an unattractive whining at speeds above 25mph, is more than adequate to power the Jazz's little frame along, even with an assortment of builders' rubble where the back passengers should be.
And though the dashboard will win no awards for leading-edge design solutions, it goes to the trouble of offering, amid the usual festoons of hard plastic, some clear buttons and aluminium dials on the hi-fi. Would Miles Davis be seen dead in a Jazz? I'm not sure. But it does have a cylindrical, cup-style ashtray which you can lift out of its slot and pass around. Now, that's jazz.
The lowdown
Honda Jazz
Price: From £ 8,995
Top speed: 106 mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 12 seconds
Consumption: 49.6 mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Gareth Gates
On the stereo: Sting
En route for: Bradford
