There is no need for Lucinda Williams to prove anything to us by making a quote-unquote jazz album; for decades now, she has exhibited formal command of an American roots mélange that’s borderless and boundary-free. She’s beyond category, and—in the cool tones of West and the limber jams of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone—she’s convincingly jazz-conversant. And there is certainly no need for Charles Lloyd to prove his country-blues bona fides; now well into his 80s, the guru-level sax master has developed a signature sound that’s earthbound and ecstatic at the same time, jazz improvisations shaded and textured by rustic folk vernaculars. The achievement of Vanished Gardens—their first on-record collaboration, released on the Blue Note label—is something far more rarified, its ambition far more sophisticated, than any exercise in the mechanics of genre. What this album proves is the insolubility of American song; it embodies traditions that have only ever existed in conversation with one another, whose threads can never be fully untangled.

Its crossed paths and cross-pollinations extend to the players themselves: Lloyd and Williams share a common language in the Bob Dylan songbook (Lloyd and his Marvels played an ebullient “Masters of War” on 2016’s I Long to See You; Williams has been performing that same song for decades). They share a few other commonalities, as well—including a couple of guitar players, Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz, who fill Vanished Gardens with electric thrum and ghostly twang. More than anything, they share an affinity for earthy music that borrows indiscriminately from American song styles. Their summit meeting on Vanished Gardens is equally split between instrumental numbers and Williams showcases; it includes new songs, standards, and reimaginings of the Williams songbook; and it’s powered by The Marvels (Frisell, Leisz, bassist Reuben Rogers, drummer Eric Harland), a loose and rangy troupe whose jazz credentials just happen to include collaborations with fellow category-killers Willie Nelson and Norah Jones. Together, they play music steeped in southern soil, but abloom with the questing, exploratory spirit of jazz. Put it on the shelf with Nelson’s Stardust, Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi, even Dylan’s Triplicate—jubilant excavations that embrace American music traditions for their emotional precision and abiding mystery, upholding folk forms even while bursting them at the seams.

Presupposing that the past is never truly past, Lloyd and Williams reopen several pages from the communal songbook. The Marvels offer a delicate reading of “Monk’s Mood,” emphasizing its wistful romance over its whimsy, the guitarists adding cowboy licks while Lloyd goes full Johnny Hodges in his rhapsodic solo. There are also relitigations of old Williams tunes—all of them chosen by Lloyd, it should be noted, with whom they proved resonant. These performances capture one of the chief delights of American folk music—the eagerness with which it reshapes and retells its stories time and time again. This rambler’s spirit animates “Ventura,” which bears witness both to Williams’ elegant formalism—the song’s as sleek and as plainspoken as a standard—but also to The Marvels’ interpretive gifts; they convey the desolation of the original, but allow the chorus to open up with hope and desire. Meanwhile, “Dust,” which chronicles the ravages of dementia, is played with verve, connecting it to the great blues tradition of resolute joy in the face of eternity. “Even your thoughts are dust,” Williams warns, and Lloyd howls his rebuttal into the void.

Vanished Gardens also upholds the folk tradition of topicality. The one new Williams composition here, “We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Around,” opens with wordless supplication from Lloyd before transforming into a kind of updated Staples Singers number; it’s a Civil Rights song born of gospel hope, clear-eyed both in its measure of progress and in its reckoning with the devil who still sits at our table. Lloyd’s sax solo toward the song’s end sounds as though it’s wafting down the hall from Charles Mingus’ Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, and Harland’s drumming, all pops and crashes, imbues crackling electricity. It’s of a piece with the opening instrumental, “Defiant,” where Lloyd builds a searching, Sonny Rollins-style solo from the ground up, then lets it snake through a thicket of high-and-lonesome pedal steel from Leisz. By maintaining its clarity of vision and its purposeful momentum through every twist and turn, the song reiterates an important civics lesson from the American canon: Keep your eye on the prize.

The band’s archivist spirit is balanced by their explorer’s zeal; they’re not here to recite but to discover, something you can hear in their burnished reading of the standard “Ballad of a Sad Young Man,” where country-Western guitars adorn a deep midnight blues, stretched out to something so sumptuous and slow it almost qualifies as ambient music. (It captures some of the same strange weather as The Milk Carton Kids’ “One More for the Road”—a hushed saloon song turned into an impressionistic American epic.) If that song maps out the solitude implicit to so much American folklore, the original instrumental “Blues for Langston and LaRue” captures the inverse, Lloyd summoning Rat Pack nonchalance as he walks his flute atop an ambling beat, careless and cool. And then there are times when everyone just loses themselves in the music. It happens in the title song, mutant bebop that lurches and howls before settling into a trance-like cool-down. And it happens most epically on “Unsuffer Me,” six minutes when Williams first recorded it on West but 11 here, an extended vamp where Williams begs and pleads, then leaves it to the guttural articulations of Lloyd’s horn to say what she can’t. Together, the players lift up one of the most hallowed and ancient set-ups of all—the yearning for redemption. All our crossed paths lead back to it eventually.