This album’s subtitle promises “Blues & Boogie Woogie Piano” and it’s accurate in at least that respect: Pianist Craig Brenner is equally fluent in New Orleans piano, straight blues, even ragtime and several different decades’ worth of jazz, and he displays all those facets on this bare-bones live set. This makes it easy to forgive that a few of these tracks are actually from dates in and near his native Bloomington, Indiana.

Brenner, a professor in both the literal and hepcat meanings of the word (okay, he teaches piano), knows enough to trot out an original (“To Boogie or Not to Boogie”) that’s highly reminiscent of Davenport’s “Cow Cow Blues,” let loose with a version of Pinetop Smith’s “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” and then tie all the historical threads together with Ray Charles’ “Mess Around.” Meade Lux Lewis’ “Honky Tonk Train Blues” and Jimmy Forrest’s deathless “Night Train” both manage to hang onto their pure blues pedigrees. And he leaves just a touch of jazz improv in Jimmy Johnson’s “Carolina Shout.”

Brenner’s vocals are the only element of this set that prove a little stiff; he unfortunately sings like a professor, too, and not the Longhair kind. (Though pulling off Fess’ “Hey Now Baby” in front of a hometown crowd is impressive enough for any outsider.) But like any great jazzer, it’s his sidemen that inspire him most: with his significant other Lori on scrubboard and former Allen Toussaint session-man Uganda Roberts on congas, his version of boogie-woogie is necessarily slower, more rhythmic, and funkier than you usually hear, even in NOLA. In their hands, “Mess Around” belongs as much to the Meters as to its antecedents. Which makes old history new history—and Brenner more than academic.