In his second album for Red House -- I reviewed Stars in My Crown in this space on 26 May 2007 -- Jorma Kaukonen sits himself in Levon Helm's Woodstock, New York, studio and lays down 13 tracks of originals and covers from favorite blues, country and folk musicians. A professional guitarist all of his adult life (stretching all the way back to his days as a founding member of San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane), Kaukonen is a consummate pro with a rich finger-picking style. His easygoing, front-porch-intimate vocals carry the songs, broadly albeit not exclusively themed around life, death and enduring values, prominent among the last family and friends. Not to mention rooted acoustic music.

Unless you just plain don't like the last -- unlikely, or you wouldn't be here -- I fail to understand how anybody could dislike River of Time, even if the last cut, "Simpler Than I Thought," does seem a tad overlong and preachy. Helm does most of the drumming, sounding as inspired as ever. Is there a better American folk drummer? That's a rhetorical question. Production is by the versatile folk-rock musician and onetime Dylan bandmate Larry Campbell, who plays throughout on a range of stringed instruments. Barry Mitterhoff provides some awfully tasteful mandolin, banjo and tenor-guitar licks, and Lincoln Schleifer handles acoustic bass with an expert's hands.

Consequently, sparks fly everywhere. Kaukonen and bandmates find an arrangement sufficient to freshen up the often covered, otherwise stale "Trouble in Mind." The Delmore Brothers' "Nashville Blues" feels almost like a new song in their treatment. If the late Ron "Pigpen" McKernan's "Operator" -- from the Grateful Dead's much-loved 1970 classic American Beauty -- doesn't sound notably different from the original, it's still a welcome choice, an amiable, countryish song more earthbound than nearly everything that surrounds it on Beauty. Unlike "Friend of the Devil" and "Ripple" from the same disc, it is rarely revived. I hadn't heard Roy Book Binder's "Another Man Done a Full Go Round" before, but it works its considerable magic via the sort of rolling rhythm one associates with melodic Piedmont blues.

As with Stars the instrumentals, highlighting Kaukonen's picking, are a particular delight. "Izze's Lullaby," written to his daughter, boasts a hypnotic melody and an unusual sound courtesy of Campbell's cittern. "Walk with Friends" (composed with Mitterhoff) has the aura of an antique Irish air. Kaukonen's command of a variety of roots genres, along with his ability to reassemble them into a personal synthesis, shines through always.