New Van Morrison album?”

No, actually, it’s The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3.

“Huh. Guess that means there were more good Van Morrison albums the last few years than I knew.”

Well, yes. Or at least more good songs. Though you’re forgiven for not noticing. In the last twenty years, Morrison has released eighteen albums on eight different labels, and that includes a skiffle set with Lonnie Donegan and a clunker with Jerry Lee Lewis’ sister, Linda Gail. It was hard to believe Morrison himself kept up with his output, except that he handpicked the tracks for the two CDs of Volume 3 personally.

Volume 3 sums up the career of a great artist who long ago embraced the work ethic of a journeyman. It takes as its model not the visionary Celtic soul music Morrison invented in the Seventies, but the straight blues and R&B he learned from in the Fifties. These days, Morrison vocalizes like a horn player –- dancing above or around the melody, clustering short phrases in staccato repetitions, drawing out beauty notes longingly – and when his albums work, they’re like old Blue Note blowing sessions: relaxed affairs in which masterful players would solo over dressed-up blues changes and ballads, catching fire occasionally and generating warmth throughout. If Bob Dylan in the last few years has strived for music that re-creates the transformative effects of his original inspirations, Morrison simply wants to cut material that shows the same effortless command as the records that he grew up on. On covers of “Georgia on My Mind” and “Lonely Avenue” or remakes of “Gloria” with John Lee Hooker and “Tupelo Honey” with Bobby “Blue” Bland, he doesn’t want to extend the tradition, just stand alongside it.

He does plenty of that on Volume 3, though there are a few duds. Blame Van for leading each CD with a softheaded collaboration (Tom Jones and the Chieftains), and it’s a shame he skips crotchety statements of purpose like “I’m a Songwriter” (”Get the words on the page/Please don’t call me a sage”) for the soporific lyricism of “The Healing Game.” But the cuts liberated from compilations — particularly a duet with Carl Perkins on “Sitting on Top of the World” from an otherwise dull Sun Records tribute and a minor-key guitar blues called “Blue and Green” lost in a Katrina-relief set — are real finds, just the stuff that greatest-hits collections were made for. One is lighthearted, full of sunshine and good whiskey, the other pulses with the darkness that comes when the whiskey isn’t working. Download them now. See what you’ve been missing.