Steve Pistorius was born in New Orleans and grew up in the suburbs, where he didn't find his way to Preservation Hall until his late teens. After high school in 1972 and a stint at LSU and the University of New Orleans, he answered a Times-Picayune ad for a barrelhouse piano player at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor in Metairie in 1973 — he was the only one who showed up — and turned it into a lifetime profession under the mentorship of banjoist Neil Unterseher and pianists including Armand Hug, Jeanette Kimball, and Butch Thompson.
Pistorius is devoted to the earliest New Orleans jazz piano styles, above all the music of Jelly Roll Morton. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he led the Mahogany Hall Stompers at Lulu White's Mahogany Hall, an afternoon gig that became a magnet for visiting musicians. He has also been the pianist for Dr. Michael White's Original Liberty Jazz Band, Banu Gibson's New Orleans Hot Jazz Orchestra, Duke Heitger's Steamboat Stompers, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and he leads his own Southern Syncopators.
His career has taken him to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Apollo Theatre, the Off-Broadway hit One Mo' Time, and tours of Europe, South America, the Far East, and the Middle East. At home he is a fixture on the Steamboat Natchez and at Preservation Hall, and his recent records include Living Room Sessions Vol. I: New Orleans Treasures, recorded in his living room on reel-to-reel with an antique RCA ribbon microphone.
