Live albums either work spectacularly or they don’t work very well at all. There was a feral, musical restlessness in the MC5 that was only captured on Kick Out the Jams, and Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard presented Coltrane diving into the deep end of the pool, exploring ideas at unprecedented lengths in his solos. Far more often, though, live albums either feel like business-driven career retrospectives or souvenirs from shows you really had to be there to appreciate.

 

Kermit Ruffins’ Live at Vaughan’s falls in the former category. He sounds far more comfortable than he has ever sounded on his studio albums, He never seems to be trying to get his charisma across; he simply is charismatic and genial, and to his and co-producer Tracey Freeman’s credit, the sound is great. It’s not only a good-sounding live album, but it’s the best-sounding album to come out on Basin Street Records.

 

The album presents a hot band on a good night, but more than that, it presents a broader Ruffins than we tend to think about. The first half of the album is the Ruffins everybody knows and expects, celebrating New Orleans at every turn, whether it’s between songs or in tunes such as “Drop Me Off in New Orleans,” “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” “Palm Court Strut” and “Treme Second Line.” That half-hour is a party, shuffling along to second line rhythms, and it’s a tribute to Ruffins that that half of the set never feels escapist. The spirited performances are so alive that there’s no question that the songs and sentiments are completely alive for him and not touchstones from theoretically better days.

 

After “Hide the Reefer,” the repertoire fast-forwards 40 or so years for a suite of late ’60/early ’70s soul hits that add a note of gravity because of their original social contexts. Sly and the Family Stone’s “If You Want Me to Stay” and William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You Got” present Ruffins and band in more of a jazz-funk mode. His trumpet solo is softer and more meditative than you hear in his New Orleans material, and it is beautifully linear, every note seeming to follow the one before it with obvious logic.

 

In James Brown’s “Talking Loud and Saying Nothing,” he plays the role of the hype man for hip-hop acts, working the crowd throughout out, and he takes the next step and raps on the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child.” It’s a perfectly acceptable rap for a non-rapper—far, far worse have been committed to disc—but its primary charm is that it puts memories of childhood and the supposedly good ol’ days in context of Katrina, even if the last is only acknowledged lightly in the final verses, and primarily in terms of rebuilding. The track and the last half-hour show Ruffins isn’t pretending modern times, musics and events don’t exist, hiding in a mythical yesteryear of musical goodness. His musical imagination is as engaged with the sound of the 1940s as it is in the 2000s, and the fact that he makes it all fun and his is his gift.

 

Kermit Ruffins plays Jazz Fest Friday, April 27 at 5:55 p.m. in the AT&T/WWOZ Jazz Tent

 

• Purchase Live At Vaughan’s on Basin Street Records here.