First you hear an old-timey banjo, then a voice like early Dylan, but soon a rousing chorus, full Americana, kicks in: drums, twin fiddles, and horns that sound like Van Morrison wrote the charts. That's "Old Dan Tucker," the opening cut on Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a multi-layered tribute not just to Pete Seeger but to "roots" music in general.

Neither Tardo Hammer nor Charles Davis can explain their success in jazz.

Hammer, who has been called “the best jazz pianist you’ve never heard,” said he never planned on a music career when he was starting out in the late 1970s.

“To me it was ridiculous to think of a career,” he said in a phone interview this week. “There wasn’t a lot of work, and jazz was really not popular. ... You hardly saw an upright bass player, and almost every piano player had to get a Fender Rhodes. If you played ‘Straight Ahead,’ that was considered something that was just about to vanish off the planet, holding onto something that was ready to expire.

“I was thinking, ‘I’ll do this now because this is what I love to do. I’ll go where this is and see what happens. I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow.’”

Nearly 30 years later, Hammer has stumbled into that jazz career, performing regularly with singer Annie Ross and also releasing three discs as a bandleader. He’ll be playing in a quartet with the venerable saxophonist Davis at the Figge Art Museum later this week. (The pair will be joined by drummer Jimmy Wormworth and bassist Lee Hudson.)