The pianist Peter Mintun resembles R. Crumb’s cartoon character “Mr. Nostalgia.” Other people may collect memorabilia, but Mr. Nostalgia physically embodies another era. Mr. Mintun’s music and his lifestyle are like that – when you step into a room where he’s playing, or into his Washington Heights townhouse, you feel like you’ve passed through a portal from one era to another. Like Mr. Nostalgia, Mr. Mintun more than looks the part – even in the most contemporary setting, he would look like he ought to exist only in sepiatone, with his hooked nose and dapper mustache.

One problem with musicians who work in the styles of earlier eras, as some have complained, is they are compelled to ignore influences from later periods. Mr. Mintun doesn’t face that problem: He has so completely immersed himself in the music of the great piano wizards of the 1920s and ’30s that he probably thinks a flatted fifth is a cocktail. Mr. Mintun is more of a jazz age musician than simply a jazz musician. He comes out of an era when the piano was the instrument of choice for vaudeville-style entertainers who were part jazz and part classical but ultimately more like traveling prestidigitators. Rightfully called “keyboard wizards,” they could make melodies appear and disappear via musical sleight of hand. Now you hear it, now you don’t.

Like a jazz pianist, Mr. Mintun improvises a great deal – playing ad-lib variations of the most melodious sort – yet he is not likely to get bogged down in chorus after chorus of blues changes. “I hate it when musicians get up there and just spill their guts out like that,” he says. “That’s why I’d rather go to a comedy club than to a concert these days – most music now is so depressing.” That said, he could doubtlessly spin a dilly of a W.C. Handy medley if one was requested.

Mr. Mintun has become a New York institution in a comparatively short time. He first worked here at the New York Palace and then spent seven years at Bemelmans Bar at the Hotel Carlyle.

A fourth-generation Californian, Mr. Mintun was born in 1950 to a medical couple (an “old-fashioned family doctor” and a nurse) in Berkeley. He was the third of four children, which aided him in his musical training in that, when it came his turn for piano lessons, he’d already heard his two older siblings stumble through all the basic exercises. He was able to play them from memory, but he didn’t fool the nice little old lady who gave piano lessons for very long. “She realized I wasn’t turning the page. She said, ‘You’re just mimicking, like a parrot!’ To this day, I’m much more of an ear player than a reader.”

He first started getting a feel for the music of the interwar period by listening to 78s handed down to him from his grandparents and their friends. His father also was a jazz fan, a longtime member of the local branch of the United Hot Clubs of America, who constantly played Fats Waller records in the Mintun household. “That was the basic music we grew up with – we had no idea that it was 20 or 30 years old then.” He began to seek out the sounds and the artifacts of the era that produced it by haunting San Francisco’s secondhand shops. “That opened a door to something that was gone but fascinating to me,” he says. “I would go through old magazines and imagine myself sitting in one of those old cars, just think about sitting in the backseat of a sedan and being able to stretch your legs!”

He was already accumulating massive amounts of sheet music and 78s by the time he worked his first steady job as a musician, playing piano for another little old lady, this one who gave dancing lessons. “She taught what used to be called a ‘social dancing’ class. This was 1962, I was 12, and she was in her 60s. I loved working for her because she had been a little girl in the ragtime era and grew up with all the music that’s come since. She taught me all the different dance tempos, fox-trots, waltzes, rhumbas. To this day, I still love playing for dancers more than anything. We’d hold dances and all the mothers of the kids would come up to me and start humming songs – I could see how much this music meant to people.”

His first big job in San Francisco was also the longest-lasting of his career, at L’Etoile in the Huntington Hotel on classy Nob Hill. That lasted from 1973 to 1989, and it was followed by a five year stint around the corner at the Fairmont, the city’s most famous hotel. “I always wanted to try New York, and I got my chance thanks to my friend [singer-pianist] Steve Ross, who recommended me to the Helmsley people.” He played the Madison Room for more than a year until a fire closed the room temporarily, at which time he switched to Bemelmans, where he alternated with the equally elegant but more modern-jazz-oriented pianist Barbara Carroll for seven years. “That’s the way I like to work,” he says, “Five nights a week, at least four or five hours a night. If you don’t know your craft when you start, you certainly will after 30 years of that. You have to be there, you have know all the tunes and get them right – and not be drunk!”

Early in 2001, he realized that there was more going on for him in New York than in San Francisco, so he sold the house he’d been living in for 25 years and bought a townhouse in the West 160s. It had been owned by the same family from when it was built in 1897 until 1981, then by a couple who maintained it and put in a pool, and eventually sold it to Mr. Mintun and his partner Eric Bernhoft. The toughest part of the ordeal was transporting their combined collections from coast to coast. “We had an enormous 16-wheel moving truck and the movers said that they had never filled one of those with any two people’s stuff before – it was so packed, we could hardly close the doors.” The statistics were: 39,000 pounds of stuff including furniture, pianos, 970 boxes of records, music, and other assorted bric-a-brac.

Mr. Mintun’s and Ms. Carroll’s contracts with the Carlyle were terminated abruptly in 2002, yet he remains a steadfast converted New Yorker. His steadiest job since then has been at the Greenbrier, a 200-year-old resort in West Virginia, which he calls “the best managed hotel I’ve ever seen.” He works mostly out of town, but continues to call New York his home. He often performs unofficially at the Film Forum, on occasions when friend Bruce Goldstein mounts a program of silent film or early musical shorts, or at the Times Square Grill, where Vince Giordano and his Nighthawks hold forth twice weekly with their take on the jazz and pop of the same era of Mr. Mintun’s specialization.

He has also recorded four CDs – which isn’t much, considering the extent of his career and the depth of his repertoire. Of these, the easiest to come by is “Grand Piano” (MM 1875), while “Yours For A Song – Here’s To The Ladies” (Premier 1065) reflects his interest in female composers, such as his late friend Dana Suesse. That last album was also the first (and so far last) to feature his singing – “I only did that because people requested it,” he says. “Now they’ve got to listen to it!”

Mr. Mintun and Mr. Bernhoft’s home could easily feel like an archive; there’s a concert grand piano, which he acquired from the late Ms. Suesse, a player piano which Mr. Bernhoft tinkers with, and a very rare reproducing piano from the 1920s. The walls still have push-button igniters for the gas jet lamps (pre-electricity illumination), call buttons (for servants), speaking tube system (an early intercom), and a working dumb waiter. It’s a time warp, yet the house doesn’t feel like a museum but a place where real-live people live and make music, and, from time to time, enjoy it on such newfangled conveniences as CD and DVD players.

“I said to Vince Giordano recently, ‘You know, we’ve been playing this music longer than the ’20s and ’30s actually existed.'” He adds, “When people used to ask me why I love this music so much, I never used to have a good answer, other than that it’s exciting, it’s danceable, it has so much personality, and the songs are so good. Now when I get asked that question, I always ask a question in return. I say, ‘This music is so great – how could anybody not love it?”