Storyville,' the second solo album by Robbie Robertson, the former guitarist and main songwriter for the Band, is an imaginative and spiritual journey, with New Orleans as its inspiration. The album takes its title from a section of the city once known, in Robertson's words, for its dedication to "fast living, hot music and moonburnt nights." But the album also trades profitably on the metaphoric meanings of its title, because Storyville is itself a community of stories – stories about love and its loss, about the search for meaning, about faith and faithlessness, about losing the world and saving your soul. It is a mature and masterful work that lends additional luster to the formidable legacy Robertson shaped with the Band.

Although New Orleans-derived music has grown increasingly fashionable over the past decade, Robertson's conception of the city and its sounds is far more sophisticated than most you're likely to encounter. For one thing he doesn't reduce New Orleans's rich musical tradition to accordion-driven party rhythms. Instead, while recording parts of Storyville in New Orleans, he called on a host of the Crescent City's musical finest, a diverse group of musicians capable of evoking a wide range of moods and styles. The reunited Meters and members of the Neville Brothers provide a healthy dose of funk and R&B; the Zion Harmonizers, a vocal group, deliver the redemptive power of the gospel sound; three separate horn sections, playing parts beautifully arranged by Wardell Quezergue, alternately supply melodic texture and rhythmic punch.

In the hands of Robertson and his co-producers, Stephen Hague and Gary Gersh, none of these musical elements overwhelms any other. They blend into a transporting, sinuous groove that runs through the entire album and spellbinds the listener. This musical suppleness is evident from the very first track on Storyville. As its title suggests, "Night Parade," a tale of parted lovers, introduces a world defined by both darkness and celebration, by a lust for life intertwined with an aching melancholy. The song is steeped in romance ("A silhouette, face in the darkness/I've been waiting for the call"), as percussion and horns provide subtle rhythmic accents and Robertson's eloquent rasp – intimate as a whisper, straining for notes it can barely reach – communicates a moving hybrid of longing and hope.

"Day of Reckoning (Burnin for You)," which Robertson wrote with producer-songwriter David Ricketts, emerges as Storyville's thematic center. An elaborate chronicle of young lovers who meet in a small town and then split apart when the woman leaves for mysterious reasons, the song ensnares the rest of the album in its "tangled twisted strands of love." Indeed, Storyville can be heard as a cycle of songs about love in its many aspects. The delicate, dreamy "Hold Back the Dawn" casts a vision of lovers blissfully "lost in the forever night." The album's first single, "What About Now," nicely embellished by the delicate ringing of Robertson's guitar, is a lover's plea to seize the moment or lose it forever: "Forget about tomorrow/It's too far away/What about now/Close your eyes/Don't talk of yesterday/It's too far away, too far away." The ballad "Breakin the Rules" echoes the lyrics of "What About Now" in a manner filled with weariness and regret: "I tried to reach you/On Valentine's Day/But how can I reach you/When you're so far away."

The desire to find love on Storyville is part of a spiritual quest for completion, to form a perfect whole with another person. So when the title character of "Soap Box Preacher" – a sweet portrait of a pilgrim seeking his bliss along the margins of society – gently warns, "Don't let the rapture pass you by," he is restating the theme of "What About Now," as well as holding out the promise of religious deliverance. The two most rocking tracks on the album, "Shake This Town" and "Go Back to Your Woods," meanwhile, both take people's relationship to the natural world as an essential index of their moral and emotional well-being.

Storyville closes on a high note, drawing on potent imagery of triumph and reconciliation for its last two songs: "Resurrection" and "Sign of the Rainbow." The album doesn't offer anything like a Hollywood happy ending; the hero is still seeking his lost love as Aaron Neville's unearthly voice fades out at the end of "Sign of the Rainbow." Both songs suggest that a sense of purpose in life is a meaningful end in itself. "When you found out what you were after," Robertson sings in "Resurrection," "I could see your spirit rise."

Finding out what you're after and finding it, of course, are two very different things, but on Storyville, Robertson manages to do both. On his first solo album, Robbie Robertson, from 1987, he seemed haunted by the myth of the Band, reluctant to step forward into the brave new pop world, eager to hide behind high-powered friends like Peter Gabriel and U2. High-powered friends showed up for Storyville, as well; in addition to the New Orleans gang, Neil Young, Bruce Hornsby and R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, among others, put in cameos. But on this album, Robertson is standing much more confidently at center stage. "I'm coming back/For the resurrection," he sings, and it's thrilling to see his spirit rise. (RS 616)

ANTHONY DECURTIS