If you have spent any time in New Orleans, you have probably heard piano spilling out of a club on Frenchmen Street and wondered who that was. There is a decent chance it was Tom McDermott. He moved to New Orleans in the mid-1980s and absorbed the city's musical DNA at a cellular level — the rolling left-hand bass, the syncopated right-hand melody, the sense that every tune is a conversation rather than a performance. But McDermott came to New Orleans with his own luggage. He had been serious about Latin music, Brazilian music, and the ragtime and stride tradition long before he arrived, and those influences never disappeared. They just got folded into the gumbo.

What makes McDermott genuinely interesting is his command of the habanera rhythm — that dotted figure that shows up in Cuban music, in tango, in early New Orleans jazz, and in a surprising amount of nineteenth-century parlor music. He hears the connections between these traditions not as an academic exercise but as a living system. When he plays a piece that sounds like New Orleans jazz but has a Cuban skeleton underneath it, he is not being clever. He is just pointing at history and saying: look, these things were always related.

His recorded work reflects that breadth. Albums like Bamboula! (2007) lean into the creole and Caribbean roots of New Orleans piano, drawing on nineteenth-century composers like Louis Moreau Gottschalk alongside original compositions written in the same spirit. He has also collaborated regularly with singer Evan Christopher and with Brazilian and Cuban musicians, and those collaborations feel natural rather than forced — he is not borrowing someone else's culture, he is participating in a conversation he has been having for years.

As a live performer, McDermott is unpretentious and generous. He talks to audiences, explains what he is doing, makes jokes. He plays solo piano with the confidence of someone who has done it thousands of times in rooms ranging from concert halls to corner bars, and he sounds equally comfortable in both. There is nothing theatrical about it. He sits down and plays, and the music is immediately identifiable as his — warm, rhythmically alive, harmonically curious without being showy.

He is not a household name outside of New Orleans and the circles that care deeply about roots-based American piano music, and that seems more or less fine with him. The work he has done documenting and extending the New Orleans and Latin piano tradition is substantial, and the musicians who know it tend to respect it a great deal. If you are new to him, a good entry point is any of his solo piano recordings — put one on, and within about thirty seconds you will have a pretty clear picture of what he is about.