Roy Rogers has several Jazz Fest highlight moments on his resume, particularly his incendiary special guest appearances with Bonnie Raitt and Steve Miller, but this year it will be his own set that should yield the pyrotechnics. Rogers will be spotlighting material from his new album, Split Decision, the first in seven years with his own band.

Split Decision includes some of the strongest songwriting of Rogers’ career and a dazzling array of guitar tones. The opening track, “Calm Before the Storm,” is the dirtiest guitar sound he’s ever recorded, a rattling bolt of distorted metallics that should be a real crowd pleaser. “Patron Saint of Pain” returns to his more familiar slide sound, a light, well articulated tone that answers his vocal lines and dances nimbly through two solo showpieces. “Walking the Levee,” one of three instrumentals on the album, is an even more focused slide sound that rides on a nifty, undulating riff.

Rogers is best known for his meticulous guitar work, but Split Decision includes several well crafted songs built on strong melodies. “River of Tears” in particular moves cleverly from a solid verse melody into a bridge that resolves itself in the chorus, then to a Latin coda that suggests “Working in a Coal Mine” and should open up dramatically in live performance. “I Would Undo Anything” is a sorrowful lament for a lost love, and “Holy Ghost Moan” fashions a catalog of blues imagery into a no excuses backward glance at a life of wrong turns.

The title of the album refers to the best song on the record, “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” a song about aging and facing losses in both love and fate that is worthy of Rogers’ great friend and mentor, John Lee Hooker. Its chorus is the essence of the blues: “Take the hand of fate. / Face the fall from grace. / Just another requiem / for a heavyweight.”