Digging into the tradition, playing vintage material for young hipsters, making musicology fun—Maria Muldaur started doing that in the Boston coffeehouses five decades ago, and Tuba Skinny is doing it in New Orleans now. So, it’s no surprise that they’ve been circling around each other for a while (Muldaur sat in with Tuba Skinny at d.b.a. two years ago) and that they’ve now made an album out of it.

The pairing makes sense on a few levels: Tuba Skinny have lacked a good frontwoman since regular singer Erika Lewis went part-time, and Muldaur can always use a band to click with. They’re enough on the same wavelength that this project avoids the clumsiness often found in cross-generational collaborations. Muldaur’s persona has always been a bit bawdy—it was she who made a ’70s hit out of Blue Lu Barker’s “Don’t Feel My Leg”—so Tuba Skinny can play loose and be respectful at the same time. Muldaur’s voice has deepened over the years, but these sessions bring out the playful/youthful quality that she’s held on to.

The tracks are all short but Tuba Skinny’s members get some nice licks in, notably Craig Flory’s clarinet intro on “Delta Bound,” Shaye Cohn’s swinging cornet on “I Like You Best of All” and Todd Burdick’s swift kick on tuba throughout. Both parties also know a lot of great songs that never get recorded anymore. Everybody covers Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” but hardly anyone does Irving Berlin’s sort-of sequel “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” about a poor unfortunate who “speaks Latin, French and Greek, but he can’t dance cheek to cheek.” The title track is a jovial Armstrong song—not Louis but his second wife Lil, an oft-overlooked songwriter. Three other notable New Orleans women, the Boswell Sisters, are covered on the album’s highlight, “Got the South in My Soul.” With Muldaur getting sultry and Tuba Skinny doing their most elegant slow groove, the song evokes the romance of the places they’re singing about.