Your Bird & Beckett proprietor well remembers the day that piano professor Eric Shifrin laid a cd on me after one of his lovely monthly dates in the bookshop (remember those burned cds that proliferated for the better part of a quarter century?). I put in the shop’s 5-cd changer and forgot about it until one day I was going about my business, thinking “who’s that wonderful piano player coming out of the house sound system” or thoughts to that effect… solo pianistics that seemed so reminiscent of all the classic piano professors from the ragtime, early New Orleans, stride and boogie woogie periods. I pulled it out and it had Eric’s name on it and a date, and those magic two words “New Orleans” — I asked him about it next time I he came in to the shop to play, and he explained he’d been down to that Crescent City on a little vacation and had thought to himself that better than any tshirt or ashtray, a good souvenir of the trip would be a recording.

So he booked an hour or two for himself at a local recording studio, sat down at their piano, rolled out the tunes he knew and loved… and brought that cd back with him to resume his life as an itinerant piano player in the bars and boites of the City of Saint Francis, a life that gives us all hope and a whole lot of pleasure.

Come hear Eric with a fine and savvy combo — this month’s iteration of “The In Crowd” — as he revisits many of those tunes and many another tune that’s found its easy way into his fingers in the ensuing decade or two…