The Greyboy Allstars are the perfect name for a bunch of white kids eternally in love with black music, even if, like a lot of their musical peers, their fascination mainly covers the kind of bumpin’ beats laid down, say, during the Nixon administration. But that’s served them well for the past 15 years, and even without founder (and, coincidentally, African-American) Karl Denson entering their tiny universe, they’d have credibility to spare. They recorded an album with former James Brown sideman Fred Wesley, for one thing, thought that was 12 years ago.

Rejoice, jam band fiends. The original crew is back for a reunion, even going so far as to recruit original band namesake DJ Greyboy, not present on their later works. And they’ve stayed true to their mission statement of replicating, live, the kind of tasty jazz-funk grooves he would spin on the San Diego scene. What Happened To Television?, the reunion album, works like a summing up of all their early discs, but the formula still works – Aretha’s “How Glad I Am” sounds like the band sampled Clyde Stubblefield on JB’s “Funky Drummer,” even though they didn’t, and Denson’s horn on the title track incorporates the jazziest soul of any instrumentalists since Booker T. and the MGs.

Then again, the moody, exploratory curlicues of “Left Coast Boogaloo” and the closing “Give the Drummer Some More” serve notice that this is not simply a gang of cut-and-paste dilettantes. They really do speak this language, even after 10 years off, and although most of the press about …Television makes this reunion sound like a one-off, the band’s new home on upstart Sci Fidelity seems to indicate a long-term rapprochement. Let’s hope the slightly twisted musical history of the Allstars outlasts the media’s obsessively gimmicky one-label mentality.