Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Henry Butler performs Saturday night at Jefferson Center.

Related

Music bllog

• More concert notes at cut N scratch

Podcast

• We talk with Butler about his music and photography, and get a great history lesson about New Orleans piano

Early in Henry Butler’s Saturday night performance at Jefferson Center, he and his band finished a funky New Orleans march of a song called “Mozart.” A guide dog in the room barked.

“I think that dog liked it,” Butler said, inspiring a laugh from the crowd. “Maybe I can teach that dog how to play piano. That would be slick.”

It was a fitting moment for Jefferson Center’s series, “The Blind Leading ... ,” a program meant to expose people to blindness and the creative process through the experiences of blind musicians. And Butler, a teacher as well as a piano player and singer, was a fitting artist to conclude the series. He combined lightning-quick, wildly syncopated and classical-infused piano work with the traditions of his hometown, New Orleans.

Butler might be a Big Easy piano player, but it would be superficial to relegate him to barrelhouse status. He is the sum of — and an addition to — his inspirations, which include mentor Alvin Batiste , as well as jazz-fusion keyboard giant George Duke.

In a free, pre-show discussion about his life and career, he told the audience of about 230 that Duke, who had been sideman to both guitarist-composer Frank Zappa and saxophonist-composer Julian “Cannonball” Adderley , pushed Butler to develop rhythmic and melodic independence between his hands. The advice obviously has paid off over the quarter-century or so that has passed since then.

Opening his set solo, he showed how effective a piano can be with no other accompaniment, bursting through the theme to “Fiddler on the Roof,” adding a darker jazz maelstrom to the Broadway version of traditional Jewish music. Later, he would toss flashes of New Orleans-style and classical piano into a Latin tune called “Samba C,” before rolling through the Lower-Ninth-Ward-churchy funk and boogie-woogie stew of “Orleans Inspiration.”

He called on his Henry Butler Trio sidemen, bassist Tony Gullage and drummer Kindler Carto , who brought the roux to a boil behind him as he strolled and rolled his hummingbird-quick fingers through “Somethin’ You Got” and “Let ’em Roll.” They also gave a literal reading to one of the American popular music catalog’s saddest and ironically misunderstood songs, “You Are My Sunshine.” Butler’s voice was up to the task on all of it.