MAESTRO: Ricky Jay knows almost as much about the musicians on his new set as he knows about cards and gambling.

Ricky Jay laughs when I tell him he reminds me of Fred Astaire. It seems this is the first time that Jay, a Brooklyn-born bear of a man with a full beard and grizzled visage, has been compared to the greatest dancer of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But like Astaire, Jay has a way of making the impossible look effortless and elegant. What’s different is that Astaire entertained with his slinky legs and a pair of taps; Jay employs his adept hands and a deck of cards.

Jay is one of the top card handlers in the world. He began performing magic, with his grandfather’s encouragement, at age seven; he came to national attention in 1970, when he threw a playing card through a watermelon rind — then repeatedly hit the same incision — at 10 paces on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

But despite two David Mamet–directed theatrical productions that showcase his sleight-of-hand mastery and his abundant knowledge of the lore of cards, magic, cheating, and curiosities of all kinds, he’s best known as a character actor. He played Bond villain Henry Gupta in Tomorrow Never Dies and appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia. He was typecast as cardsharp Eddie Sawyer on TV’s Deadwood. His long association with playwright/filmmaker Mamet also includes roles in House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and State and Main.

So his first public foray into music, the elegantly packaged set Ricky Jay Plays Poker (Octone/Legacy), comes as an engaging — albeit gambling-themed — surprise. The just-released box is a card fanatic’s fantasy. Inside there’s an eclectic CD of 21 poker-themed songs that range from the 1920s string-band music of the Mississippi Sheiks to Robert Johnson’s vintage blues to R&B legend O.V. Wright to Bob Dylan to pop modernists Saint Etienne. The mostly rootsy numbers are about cheating, heartbreak, power, desire, loss, anger — a window into the emotionally and psychologically charged territory of the game.

Then there’s a 25-minute DVD where Jay dazzles a table of players with his mind-boggling cheating skills, amusing anecdotes about underhanded playing, and pure peacock trickery. He’s also written a funny, informative 66-page book that describes his life-long fascination with the game and the history of cheating, with an analysis of the songs that explores asides about country legend Merle Travis’s picking style and the subtleties of Patsy Cline’s catalogue. The icing is a handsome regulation deck of playing cards made especially for the set.

When I spoke with Jay by phone from Los Angeles, he’d just finished a run of his one-man show Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants and was getting ready to return to the same theater for an opening of Mamet’s Speed the Plough. He seems like a man who loves his work — all of it.

Who on Earth would play cards with you?
I really don’t play cards. I stopped a long time ago. You make a decision about whether you want to entertain with cards or play cards. It’s pretty tough to try to do both.

Is poker your favorite card game?
I’m also fond of faro, but it’s really hard to get anybody to play that anymore. It was the most popular pre-poker betting game in the world. In Europe in the 18th century it was a very big high-stakes game, and it was popular in the Old West. The pace of poker is so much more appealing to today’s players, and it’s a much more interesting game in terms of psychology. Faro is mostly about betting the high and low card, and various propositions laid out along that.

You seem to know as much about the musicians on Ricky Jay Plays Poker as you do about the game and the various hands and cheating techniques they sing about.
Not as much, although I absolutely love the music and I’ve been compiling gambling tunes for years for my own amusement. I’m really interested in so-called old-timey music and blues, and I spent a large part of my early career opening for a wide variety of bands, so I have pretty eclectic taste. The history of cheating is something I am truly passionate about.

I have many more songs in my files about gambling in general and many other poker tunes, but this collection of songs seems to mesh. We were very lucky to get the licensing on everything we wanted, with one exception. The Ray Charles estate wouldn’t let us use “The Cincinnati Kid,” but because of that I got to include Frank Krumit’s “Dolan’s Poker Party,” with his marvelous little game, from the 1920s.

During the ’70s you toured as an opener for bands. How brutal was that?
It could be brutal, but I didn’t work so much with rock groups. I worked mostly with blues acts, country bands, bluegrass or jazz acts, like Emmylou Harris and David Grisman. Opening for Old and in the Way with Jerry Garcia was far better than the time I opened for the B-52’s, which was clearly a bizarre match. Back then my hair was longer than most of the musicians’. I think I was the first guy to do sleight-of-hand on that circuit.