If their name is something of a mouthful, the Nashville-based Markey Blue (Jeannette Markey) and Ric Latina make up for it with a lean blues/r&b approach accompanied by some nuanced jazz flourishes. Understand, I'm not certain that explains what's happening here, though you'll surely notice those strains should you have the good fortune to be exposed to Jumpin' the Broom.

I could add that everything, always less than more, is precisely what it needs to be. You could call the Markey/Latina approach comfortable and conversational, not what you could say about a whole lot of bombastic, borderline belligerent modern blues-rock.

In fact, with their deceptively casual touch Markey, whose unforced yet commanding vocals suggest a friend who's confiding real-life stories of love, sex and romantic conflict often leavened with a mordant humor, is a happy diversion from the belters and shriekers who dominate blues recording and performance in the genre's second century. Her husband as of this album (their fourth together), Ric Latina, offers up sinewy guitar with a mildly swampy, though thoroughly urban, vibe. Horns work to appropriate effect but never try to roll over anybody or anything.

On top of that, the 10 cuts, all Latina/Markey collaborations, catch the listener's attention whether or not you intended as much when you put the disc on the player (or whatever you do to direct music your way; I'm of the old school). It's not as if the songs are showcasing ambitious themes or fancy lyrics. Nothing here isn't familiar in some fashion or another, but given such expertly crafted, affectingly melodic, movingly delivered material, it would be churlish indeed to complain.

Like so many musical genres that have been around for a while -- I'd say, depending on how you define such things, this school of r&b has its origins in the Memphis, Chicago and New Orleans of the 1940s -- this is all non-novel in a broad sense. But Jumpin' the Broom is not an exercise in revivalism either. Nor is its rooted music subjected to an attempt at reinvention. It is just itself, suited to the particular (and more than respectable) talents of Latina and Markey, sufficiently at ease that what it does emerges as an art requiring no particular explanation.

It's just what it is. You'll recognize it when it wafts through ears and spirits near you, leaving lives richer as it passes.