In New Orleans, the present is always haunted by the past, and nowhere more so than within the city’s great musical traditions, where the fondly remembered figures of history regularly make appearances on barroom stages and neighborhood streets all around the city under the guise of repertory and stylistic tributes—from the anthems of Louis Armstrong to dancefloor medleys of unforgettable ’50s R&B hits to the vast repertoire of classic tunes, old and new, regularly played by the city’s superb brass band musicians, old and young.

On The Crave: Piano Music from New Orleans and Beyond, New Orleans pianist, composer and arranger Tom McDermott engages some of New Orleans’ most essential keyboard ghosts, beginning with the seminal, 19th-century pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk and continuing through Jelly Roll Morton (born Ferdinand Le Mothe), Professor Longhair (born Henry Roeland Byrd), and Dr. John (born Malcolm Rebennack).

Along the way, McDermott corrals some apparitions closely related to the core New Orleans tradition, especially those who shed light on the syncopated roots of jazz—from the pan-Caribbean influences of Louis Gottschalk, Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, and Cuban composer/pianist/bandleader Ernesto Lecuona through Scott Joplin’s elegant perfection of ragtime to the Harlem stride renderings of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith.

An accomplished arranger (in addition to working for the Dirty Dozen, McDermott is co-founder of the New Orleans Nightcawlers brass band) and composer (his previous CDs, All the Keys and Then Some and Louisianthology are tours de force of wit, invention, sly affection and ferocious humor), McDermott has gathered his source materials with careful intelligence and offers them, along with four of his own compositions, in a torrent of delightful facility.

Here, for example, is Dr. John’s gorgeous and sentimental tribute to his mother, “Dorothy,” followed by a tiger-headed, four-handed romp through “Tico Tico,” in tribute to yet another patron saint of New Orleans piano, the inimitable James Booker. Or Willie “The Lion” Smith’s unexpectedly dainty “Echoes of Spring” followed by Jelly Roll’s exploration of Cuban dance rhythms in “The Crave.”

The opening tracks, a high-spirited rendition of Ernesto Nazareth’s galloping “Fon Fon” followed by “Viper’s Drag” from Fats Waller, which segues from balladic melancholy to manic hilarity, plunge us straight into the world McDermott has created—a universe of ghosts where mid-19th-century folk songs and mid-20th-century R&B coexist entirely peacefully, bound together by rhythmic and melodic language that permeates the whole of the New World musical canon.

Throughout, McDermott unleashes his own approach to the keyboard, an amalgam of ragtime and stride basics filtered through a rolling, lilting sensibility that brings both the New Orleans love of sublime melody and the city’s craving for rhythmic intensity into play. With a deliberate technique that remains faithful to each composition’s original character, McDermott coaxes from each a familial strain, a Latin flavor that bridges the distance from from Havana to Harlem.

Here are classical-quality chops deployed with gently swaying rhythms taking on a newly discovered repertoire—Joplin and Bechet meet Fats Waller and Prof. Longhair in Old World Rio de Janeiro—that open up a sumptuous, pleasurable and profound view of jazz history, one that may be possible only from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz and the Caribbean’s northernmost port city. For those seeking an unexpected, intoxicating and ear-opening appreciation of the Crescent City’s keyboard heritage, masterfully played, The Crave is sure to satisfy.