Tom McDermott does not stand out in a crowd.

The affable, laid-back pianist could be a bit character from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, a reference that traces McDermott’s biography to St. Louis, where he was born in 1957. He was already playing the music of Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin as a teenager before moving downriver to New Orleans to search for the wellspring of James Booker’s inspiration.