Covers albums always have a couple of built-in booby traps. You play it too close and there’s no point; you take too many liberties, and you may wind up trashing the songs you love. The best way out is just to assemble a good band and play it like you mean it, not worrying too much about whether you sound like someone else’s record. That’s what saxophonist Jimmy Carpenter and his crew have done on this set of oft-recorded (mostly) Louisiana classics.

Your collection of local music is frankly lousy if you don’t have these tunes in your collection already; most are standards from the ’50s and ’60s R&B song book. It’s the setlist you might hear if a club band relaxes in the last set of the night and starts playing its own favorites, and that sounds like what’s happening here. The whole disc has live feel, with the band’s three soloists—Carpenter, John “Papa” Gros and guitarist Mike Zito—all getting chances to show their stuff (Zito gets good and raunchy on “Barefootin’” and Gros’ tasty Hammond solo on “I Got Loaded” is enough to justify one more take on that familiar tune). But the real heroes of the disc are the rhythm section of bassist Casandra Faulconer (ex-Cowboy Mouth) and drummer Wayne Maureau (Walter “Wolfman” Washington’s Roadmasters) who kick everything up a notch, whether they’re doing a marching-band groove on Dr. John’s “Traveling Mood” (the only ’70s tune here) or putting a Fess-like rhumba feel into Chris Kenner’s “Something You Got.”

Occasionally they throw a left curve, as on the Hammond-led arrangement of Art Neville’s “All These Things”—which here recalls, of all things, Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” The non-Louisiana songs here (“Cry to Me,” “Bring It On Home”) get local-sounding spins, and Carpenter appropriately closes with a lesser-known tune, “Rockin’ at Cosimo’s,” by New Orleans sax master Lee Allen. It adds up to a good reminder of why we keep these songs around.