Display excerpt of next and previous posts in sidebar (single post view)

I have a single column layout and in my ‘bottombar’ on single page view, I’d like to show the title, excerpt and maybe the comment count/other post meta data like this (the space on the right is for other sidebar stuff like subsribe options, list of most recent posts etc.):
==========================================
| Current Post
| Title
| Content
| Meta Data
| Comments
==========================================
| Previous Post
| Title
| Excerpt
|————————–
| Next Post
| Title
| Exerpt
==========================================

Is this possible? If it’s in the sidebar.php then it’s outside the loop, is it possible to get the id of the current post and use it to get the info of the next and previous posts? Do i have to have part of the sidebar code in the single.php template to do this then include a sidebar-single.php without the beginning part of the sidebar?

Ok, maybe I should stop suggesting stuff. I’ll leave it to the experts to tell me what I should do. Any help would be really great. Thank you!