1978 · Album
New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live!
Recorded 1978 · Gold Records (Swiss label); reissued 1981 as New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live! · Original Release: Live! (1978, Gold Records); 1981 reissue added 'New Orleans Piano Wizard' title
Booker's Fingers Flying Across the Keys
A virtuoso pianist at full tilt, playing like the room might disappear any second.
By 1978, when this performance was recorded in Switzerland, James Booker had been playing piano for decades—a fixture in New Orleans clubs, a session musician, a man with serious chops but little to show for it commercially. This live recording captures him at that point: accomplished, inventive, and still operating in near-total obscurity. What's striking is not that he finally got recorded; it's that the recording reveals a musician at genuine mastery, unfussy and direct.
Booker's approach here is all appetite and precision. He works through standards and blues changes with a pianist's command of harmony and a performer's instinct for drama—sudden tempo shifts, left-hand figures that bubble under the melody, runs that feel effortless because they're so clean. He's not showing off; he's simply playing like someone with nothing left to prove and nowhere in particular to go. The recording is live, the sound is direct, and there's an urgency to it that studio work might have smoothed away.
AllMusic and the Santa Barbara News and Review both rated this 4/5, and the Lincoln Journal Star gave it 4.5/5—stronger than you'd expect for a reissued live session from a nearly anonymous pianist. It matters because it preserved a moment before Booker's later recordings and recognition gave him some measure of the attention he should have had all along. Start here if you want to know what a serious New Orleans pianist actually sounded like when nobody was watching.
Who's playing
James Bookerpiano
