Geoff Keezer followed pianist Benny Green into Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1989 at the age of 19. He joined on the recommendation of the earlier Messengers pianist, James Williams.

In what turned out to be Blakey’s final ensemble, Keezer, like many pianists who passed through the Messengers ranks, is said to have found his own voice while with the drummer, but in truth, players like Williams attest he was already well on the way to achieving that anyway. After Blakey, he was able to hold his own in Bradley’s, that most exacting of piano bars in New York City, where on any night some of jazz’s greatest pianists would come to relax in the audience after hours.

Live at Birdland if anything else, reveals Keezer to be at heart a late night jazz club pianist (which many would argue is the finest kind) since his intimate art does not translate well to the formal stage. A small guy, he is not given to muscular piano bashing but is the possessor of a very rounded technique that somehow embraces the whole history of the jazz piano, he is nothing if not absorbing. With Patitucci and Penn he has players totally on his wavelength. Playing off a repertoire of Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea originals plus two of his own songs, this album captures an exemplary example of a piano trio in the mainstream American jazz tradition, as of 2023; the apparent ease of his playing over the well-conceived harmonies of Corea and Shorter is indicative of a high level of musicianship, and he has the technique to make it sound so easy. He is, as Blakey intended, yet another of his sidemen who is keeping the flame burning.