By now, it should be obvious that this is not your father’s Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Under Ben Jaffe’s leadership, it has become something more post-modern and conceptual. The name’s the thing, even if the cast of players changes from session to session and track to track. It celebrates New Orleans and traditional jazz, but it does so broadly, reaching beyond the obvious canon for lesser known songs or modern songs that owe the city’s musical past a debt. The implication is that the band and the songs have something to say today, even if it takes a King Britt remix or two to make that point obvious.

Preservation continues in that vein, this time with guest artists singing with the Hall Band. It’s easy to imagine Tom Waits, Del McCoury, Andrew Bird and Richie Havens forcing the band to a subordinate position by the strength of their musical personalities, but like Galactic’s last two albums, the sound and concept of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band dominate, and the guests come off as exactly that. The interplay, though, highlights the rightness of Jaffe’s central premise. The sound of the band with the rotating roster of singers gives the album a theatrical dimension as they step up one-byone and enter a musical context that feels staged somewhere between antiquity and modernity.

Those who look to the Hall Band for great ensemble playing will find hot moments—the break in “Freight Train,” sung by an almost unrecognizable Ani DiFranco comes to mind—but for the most part, Preservation presents the band as an inventive group that swings like mad while pulling folk, blues, Western Swing and 20th Century popular song into a New Orleans idiom. They get rowdy in sympathy when Tom Waits sings Danny Barker’s “Tootie Ma Was a Big Fine Thing” and add bounce to Brandi Carlile’s mid-tempo take on “The Old Rugged Cross.” In one of the album’s most powerful performances, they quietly clear space for Havens’ soulful “Trouble in Mind.”

It’s a tribute to the Hall band that they and the singers mesh, regardless of age or aesthetic backgrounds. You’d expect them to be simpatico with the Blind Boys of Alabama and Merle Haggard (who grew up idolizing Western Swing king Bob Wills), but they sound just as natural behind Paulo Nutini and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James/Yim Yames (his solo artist name, I gather). James offers up the most stylized performance, masking his voice by singing through a megaphone. It works, though, as it mimics the mute Mark Braud uses on his trumpet and makes the track sound like a lightly worn 78. The effect gives his version of “St. James Infirmary” a ghostly quality—a thought underscored by his muted howls—and perhaps because of it, the band doesn’t entirely respect his vocal space, playing as if he’s there but not.

Ultimately, those dynamics between the artists and the band give a new generation a way to appreciate the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Whether they recognize or value ensemble playing or not, they hear a band performing with life, imagination, energy and taste regardless of who’s singing, and Preservation is ultimately their album. After all, as big as the guests are, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band is a name known worldwide and across generations. It’s bigger. With Preservation, they give another generation or two a reason to pay attention to them as music, not just as an institution.