I just had a very similar issues with gradle builds / adding .jar library. I got it working by a combination of :
compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: '*.jar')}
BUT more importantly and annoyingly, only hours after I get it working, Android Studio have just released 0.3.7, which claims to have solved a lot of gradle issues such as adding .jar libraries
http://tools.android.com/recent
Hope this helps people!