A review of a Steve Howell, Dan Sumner & Jason Weinheimer album was last posted in this space on 25 July 2020 (Long Ago). Native Texan, present-day Louisianan, guitarist/vocalist/musical archivist Howell is someone who never fails to meet my expectations, whether he's arranging and performing material I know intimately (oldtime folk and downhome blues) or more casually (the American Songbook, the genre designation given the classic jazz-pop that flourished between the 1920s and the 1950s).

Sumner & Weinheimer share comparable sensibilities and skills. The prospect that the three together would turn in a second-rate set is effectively nonexistent.

On his previous release Howell was featured solo on Gallery of Echoes (reviewed here on 12 August 2023), revisiting grassroots sounds with his usual magic. This time, with his companions on guitar and bass respectively, the attention is on songs associated with Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, W.C. Handy, Cole Porter and lesser immortals.

How recognizable they will be to you depends on how deeply you've explored pre-rock popular music. In the latter 1950s rock 'n' roll's massive wave rolled over just about everything that had come before it, and the rock critics of the following generation stupidly declared the songs of saloon and stage of little consequence next to whatever noise excited them at the moment. (I don't intend a wholesale putdown of what's now known as "classic rock," but of what now can be seen as rockist deafness.)

Later, as pop-music writing grew less provincial and more sophisticated, the American Songbook came to be championed by a wide range of artists from Linda Ronstadt to Bob Dylan as the likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett experienced, and deserved, significant career revivals.

If you're looking for movingly performed examples of pop music as a form of high art, presented in arrangements that are as rich as they are spare, I Don't Mind will more than satisfy. In my own moment of listening, on a gray, cool, early fall day, it's just about the perfect soundtrack: lovely, observant, wise, the lyrics as poetic as any words attached to melody can be. That's not to mention Howell's way with the emotions and the stories, or Sumner & Weinheimer's with the notes and the swing.