He's still a soul man

Al Green has hip young collaborators on his new CD, but it sounds old school

NEW ORLEANS - Al Green is 62 now, but it's easy to envision what the good reverend looked like as a child. When he smiles that familiar high-wattage grin, his remarkably unlined face lights up like a kid who just heard the ice cream truck jingle from around the corner.

When he laughs it is an unabashed giggle. He continuously interrupts himself to take off on flights of song in a voice that remains equal parts butter and grits, prim and primal. Years of preaching at his Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis have also gifted him with a unique manner of speaking as sentences spill into one another and octaves rise and fall with varying degrees of urgency.

For instance, of his divided pursuits, he says: "I feel like Al Green the performer, Al Green the pastor, Al Green the singer is the same person sitting right here talking to you. They're the same people. You can't divide up a child. If he's the child, he's the child, you can't cut his feet off and make somebody else." Regardless of your religious denomination, or lack thereof, you find yourself involuntarily erupting with "mmm-hmm" and "amen" as he testifies.

Ensconced in a hotel suite prior to an appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival last month, Green, clad in a snazzy velour track suit and with one eye on the golf tournament silently playing out on a nearby television, has plenty to smile, laugh, sing, and testify about. His new album, "Lay it Down," out Tuesday, is a stone classic. It is his third release since hooking up with the Blue Note label in 2003, and, even though the first two albums were produced by the man who co-created Green's early-'70s classics, "Lay it Down" is by far the Al Green-est of them all.

Which may come as a surprise to anyone who skims the list of contributors to the project, some of whom were not yet born when Green began turning out some of the most enduring R&B music of all time with classics like "Let's Stay Together," "Love and Happiness," and "Tired of Being Alone." Riding shotgun as co-producers with Green were Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, drummer for the revered hip-hop group the Roots, and Roots-associated keyboardist-producer James Poyser

Green's spiritual, neo-soul offspring John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, and Corinne Bailey Rae all showed up with pens in hand. And the Dap-Kings, the brass might behind Sharon Jones and Amy Winehouse, provide the horn power.

That supporting cast reeks of a desire to keep up with the cool kids. And yet there is very little about "Lay it Down" that could be dubbed "neo." From the title track, which eases you in with silken strings and an entreaty to connubial bliss, to the closer "Standing in the Rain" - where Green bathes in the redemptive power of love - the record feels like it could've been released in 1977. The howls remain piercing, the crooning smooth, and the accompaniment tasteful with an undercurrent of rawness.

"Once you get down with making the music fold around the artist, then you'll start playing exactly what they wound up playing," Green says of his collaborators. "That music is 2008, but it's of the same source. And you're not going to get away from that."

And who would want to? "That's what they said. 'We don't want you to! In fact, it will be good if we can just improve on what you did,' " recalls Green with delight.

And that was exactly Thompson's mission. He considers the response "this sounds like an old Al Green album," the highest compliment. He had hoped to do for Green what Jack White of the White Stripes did for country icon Loretta Lynn on her 2004 album, "Van Lear Rose": reintroduce a legend by returning to the original template without resorting to cheap imitation.

"More than the creative aspect, and the lyrical aspect, to me the way that the album sounds is important," says Thompson, who left in tape hiss, amp noise, and Green's ad-libs and giggles. "All that stuff is the most important stuff."

All parties seemed to agree that Green's two previous Blue Note releases, which took the same basic approach with longtime producer Willie Mitchell, were solid but a little too polished. "Lay it Down" restores a certain meatiness and gristle to the Southern soul. "I wanted it raw," says Thompson, "but Al wanted it filthy." Or as Green succinctly puts it, "It goes out and grabs the sound."

That immediacy flowed from sessions in which the participants brainstormed and worked on the fly: Green would sing a horn part for the Dap-Kings, Bailey Rae and Legend wrote verses in the studio, and Hamilton had some ideas about the background-vocal arrangements.

Each served Thompson's original mission. Hamilton's growl roughs up Green's more caressing style on the title track and the pleading "You've Got the Love I Need." Meanwhile, the Dap-Kings effortlessly toggle between urbane cool and juke-joint funk, and Legend and Bailey Rae form a heavenly choir on "Stay With Me (By the Sea)."

Even though Green, who will be one of the first performers in the new Showcase Live! venue near Gillette Stadium Nov. 21, was aware of his collaborators, he didn't overly familiarize himself with their catalogs.

"I didn't want to know what they was all about," he says. "I just wanted to know that when I get to the studio, can I function and work with this person? And when it started coming in the studio, it just kept on coming. The first night we got together it got to coming so much that I wrote eight songs in one night, and we ain't got but 11 on this album."

Major Green fan Alicia Keys thinks hooking up with Thompson and the other young 'uns is a stroke of genius.

"As long as the sound is relevant, which it will be, it's so smart to combine with ?uestlove - and still exciting because it's soulful and heartfelt but still has that thing that we're all used to hearing," she says. "That will probably make people go back to his other records and discover him for the first time."

And discover that whether it's 1968 or 2008, Al Green is still in love with soul music: "You want to have a good time with it, and that's what we tried to do."

Sarah Rodman can be reached at srodman@globe.com.