Is there any good reason why there aren't more records made like the one you hold in your hands? A record like this one, with masterful works by Leadbelly and Rodgers & Hammerstein, Bruce Springsteen and Son House is exceedingly rare.

To give voice to such a catalog requires a supple, versatile instrument of enormous communicative power - such as those of the best interpretive singers of the 20th century. With this recording the acclaimed classical singer Jubilant Sykes proves himself a profoundly talented twenty-first century student of the American popular song, his splendid, arresting voice luminous with the responsive awe of the gifted apprentice.

Sykes was born in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and his parents favored Ella and Sarah; their shy, intensely musical son distinguished himself in the church choir while getting his ABC's from the Jackson Five. A door opened for the young boy when he first heard "the glory" of Leontyne Price: the "Truth of her words" made him aware of how much could be communicated in song. Over time, Sykes has become a sought-after recitalist and a leading interpreter of sacred music with a luxuriant baritone instrument that he uses with grace, passion and conviction. His first recording outside the classical realm was an adventurous and well-received collaboration with the New Orleans jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, an eponymous meditation on black spirit-ual music that married improvisation to the discipline of classical singing.

This record is something else again, and was born of Sykes's introduction to the producer Craig Street, a scholar and champion of a broadly defined American songbook, acclaimed for his genre-busting collaborations with Cassandra Wilson, Manhattan Transfer, Afro-Peruvian sensation Susana Baca, Joe Henry, Jeb Loy Nichols, M'Shell Ndegeocello. "Astonished" by the timbre, agility and ardor of Sykes's voice, he proposed a "wide open" collaboration between them.

This was their arrangement: Street, a New Yorker, would mail homemade cassettes of suggestions to Sykes in Los Angeles. Sykes would listen and respond, much as an actor considers a role. For him, searching out the songs was "like reading poetry or a road map" - was this a lyric he could get inside? Were the lyric and the melody inextricably wed? Could he bring something to the song that was new and different? American songsmith Yip Harburg once observed, "Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought." In this spirit, producer and artist worked from "an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view," as they crafted a repertoire that resonated with the singer from a world of music with which he was almost completely unfamiliar.

Sykes found himself at the start of a steep learning curve. Accustomed to the demands of live acoustic performance, he found out that a pop record is built, every sound subject to manipulation with the intention of creating one complete, ideal and irresistible performance. The huge voice required to be heard at the back of the house over a full orchestra was reined in, revealing subtle colors and new dynamic possibilities.

While he casts a wide net for songs, Street carefully chooses a nuanced instrumental palette, preferring to work with just a few musicians, specifically, musicians who can "play anything." Heard here to dazzling effect are the pianists Mark Batson and Teddy Borowiecki; bassists Greg Cohen and David Piltch; Chris Bruce (guitar); Regina Carter (violin); Dave Douglas (trumpet); Joey Baron (percussion); Guy Klesuvic (accordion); Greg Leisz (slide guitar, mandolin); singer Jennifer Warnes and Street's longtime "secret weapon," Stephen Barber, the Texas new music composer equally at home with the sculpted lyricism of Samuel Barber and the indefatigable boogie of ZZ Top. A small string section, mostly culled from the New York Philharmonic, completes the ensemble. There were many trips to The Well - Street's slang for the songbooks of Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, to which he returns again and again for inspiration. Lots of tunes came and went, not every experiment worked, but in the end there were enough single-take performances to humble everyone in the room, and you, too. The record opens with Barber's delicately balanced, suspended-chord arrangement of Bruce Springsteen's ballad of pledges made, "If I Should Fall Behind." Sykes's voice is a revelation, silken and dramatic, plaintive, intimate and utterly in service to the song - a glittering promise of things to come.

Son House had a grave vision of "John the Revelator" writing the Book of the Seven Seals; Greg Cohen's austere, unassailable arrangement bows to Regina Carter's sere, sawing fiddle and closes in a judgement of broken glass. A duet with the exquisite pop soprano Jennifer Warnes follows, on John Hiatt's enduring entreaty, "Have a Little Faith in Me," Cohen's snaking bass line writhing beneath Guy Klesuvic's gently respiring squeeze box. Arguably one of the most ominous recordings ever made of Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain" came of Sykes's introduction to the King of the Delta Blues. Stephen Barber's windblown arrangement for strings and bass clarinet is all reeds and sticks and starless desolation; Sykes's cauterizing performance illuminates the disbelief at the heart of betrayal.

Now the disposition shifts. What follows is perhaps the record's biggest gamble, an echoing chamber confection of Randy Sparks's "Today," a heartwrecker long out of earshot, the best track on an otherwise timeworn Jefferson Airplane lp, Crown of Creation. Rodgers & Hammerstein's breathless ode to wishful thinking, "It Might as Well Be Spring," follows: Cohen's winsome setting matches the singer smile for smile. Dave Douglas's horn arches over a joyful, piping, Copland-esque interpretation of Bob Dylan's clarion call, "Ring Dem Bells." Then comes Syke's own "Angels' Lullaby," written for his sleepy children in a loving moment's notice. Brian Wilson's celestial plaint, "God Only Knows" - his wholly successful "song that would last forever" - comes next, arrayed in slide guitar and pump organ.

A moment later you receive the decidedly mixed bad news from Leadbelly that "death is slow, but death is sure" for those without that true religion. His forbidding assessment explodes in joy, shepherded by a ghostly piano of the sort that accompanies dancing skeletons. In the next two minutes, the refrain of Rodgers & Hart's "Wait till You See Her" is delivered as an incantation, a spell cast by one under a spell himself. Wait till you hear it.

Last is Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennan's "Take It with Me," a tender appreciation of a great love nearing the end of its earthly run. Sykes's serene, unhurried performance gently communicates the circumstance of the lover, for whom time is passing quickly now.

God only knows why there aren't more records made like this one. Take it with you wherever you go.