Everyone knows Fess and Booker, but New Orleans piano goes deeper, and Tom McDermott understands this. On this new collection of mostly previously recorded material, the longtime New Orleans resident could be channeling the past, exploring the earlier jazz, classical and ragtime sounds that have fed into the Crescent City’s semitropical mélange.

Opening with the album’s namesake (and one of three covers), Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s inimitable “Bamboula,” McDermott sets the tone: light syncopation, some tasteful guest spots by the likes of Aurora Nealand (on soprano sax) and Evan Christopher (clarinet), and lots of acoustic piano, beautifully recorded, with space and echo making for a soft-but-lively sound. McDermott has always drawn on both classical and jazz, specifically the kind of early music that showed what Jelly Roll Morton called the music’s “Spanish tinge,” and that background shows up well here, notably in the original numbers that make up the bulk of the disc. A melancholy “Atrapado” evokes Debussy as much as Dr. John, while “The Big Man” plays a minor melody lightly against some subtle bluesy comping with a touch of tango.

Accordionist Patrick Harison takes the lead in a waltzing “Musette in A Minor,” as well as what was the piano solo on Almost Native version in this never-before-released take.

“Irresistivel,” one of several tunes featuring Christopher’s playful clarinet, mixes those Latin polyrhythms with a bit of ragtime, evoking the duo’s other collaborations. The result fits in nicely with the two Scott Joplin numbers, the up-tempo “Chrysanthemum” and the more lyrical “Heliotrope Bouquet,” setting McDermott up to continue the history he so clearly adores.