I giggled like a schoolboy when I saw that Marcus Roberts was playing UNCA this weekend.

That’s not a very good sentence to open a jazz column. Everyone knows jazz writing is supposed to be august and rarefied — the critical equivalent of wine-tasting notes — but I can’t help it. I’ve wanted to see Marcus Roberts for years. I’ll spare you an annotated list of my 20 Favorite Piano Pounders, but it’s safe to say that Marcus Roberts lands somewhere in the middle, above Pinetop Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis but not quite on par with Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Yancey, or Dr. John. I’d give a couple of eyeteeth to see any of the pianists on that list, but I don’t have to. Marcus Roberts can be had on Friday for less than 20 bucks, and Dr. John is coming to the Orange Peel in February.

Marcus Roberts hit my list with a bullet back in 1995, the year I laid hands on If I Could Be With You, a collection of 20 solo recordings that wander from spirituals to stride to bop and back. It’s a genuine treat: lyrical, loping, dazzling, emphatic, big, reverential, and sweet. It’s the sort of album that makes me wish I hadn’t quit piano in the ninth grade. It’s the sort of album that makes me wish that I was twice as disciplined and 10 times as talented as I am. I’m not, of course, but Marcus is, and when I listen to that record I can sit back and pretend I’m him.

There are some who dismiss Marcus Robert as derivative. He’s a disciple of the Wynton Marsalis throwback school, and many of his albums trace the paths laid down by those who came before. There’s a Gershwin album, a Joplin album, two Ellington albums, and an album filled with Monk and Jelly Roll Morton. His most recent, Cole After Midnight, explores the work of Nat King Cole and Cole Porter.

Friday’s show will give those critics fuel for their fire. Titled “In the Footsteps of Giants,” it’s an evening dedicated to two North Carolina legends, Thelonious Monk (b. Rocky Mount, 1917) and John Coltrane (b. Hamlet, 1926). Much of the set list will be pulled from the Monk and Coltrane playbooks, and skeptics will grumble that Roberts is jazz music’s most celebrated cover artist.

But the Great Gordo sez that to dismiss Marcus Roberts as a copycat is plain foolish. Roberts is no mere mimic: he takes those old songs and digs within them, turns them inside out and makes them his own. His style is informed not only by his appreciation for jazz history, but by his own sense of rhythm and grace. At his best, Roberts’s versions of the classics are not recitals but reinventions, and by the time he gets through with them, he deserves as much credit for their sound as those who first put them to paper. (And if you doubt me, listen to his version of “The Entertainer” on The Joy of Joplin.)

Marcus Roberts may not go down as one of the great composers of our time, but he will surely go down as one of the great players. That’s good enough for me.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)