Keys to the Highway : A special month of blues at Alexander’s will open with Deanna Bogart and her fusion of musical styles.

Deanna Bogart will kick off “Women in Blues” month Monday night at Alexander’s in Ventura when she attacks her piano with all the intensity of Humphery Bogart slapping Peter Lorre around in “The Maltese Falcon.” And she can sing better than Sam Spade, who does so to the cops at the end of the movie.

Bogart was born in Detroit, raised in New York and Phoenix, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s and since then has lived in Maryland long enough to become an Orioles fan. Somewhere in between all this road tripping, she taught herself to play the piano. It worked. Bogart has been voted Best Piano Player in the Mid-Atlantic region by Maryland Musician Magazine.

“In the early eighties, I was living in L.A.; I wasn’t a musician, but I wanted to be,” said Bogart in a recent phone interview from Monterey. “I got a job as a harmony vocalist for Cowboy Jazz and relocated to Maryland. It was sort of a Grateful Dead meets Bob Wills thing. Then I borrowed $1,000, bought a road piano and learned about crab cakes.”

Bogart went from harmony vocalist to pianist to lead vocalist for Cowboy Jazz. In the mid-1980s, she took up the saxophone and joined the guy with the cool name, Root Boy Slim and his Capitol Offense Band. Since 1987, Bogart has fronted her own band, dazzling audiences with her boogie-woogie piano playing and her sax solos.

“I always loved the saxophone,” Bogart said. “But in high school when band class came around my mom told me that girls don’t play the saxophone--they play the clarinet. So I took clarinet, but I also played my mother’s guitar. Years and years later, I bought myself a sax just to see what would happen.”

Although Bogart will be doing the Blue Monday thing, she doesn’t do the traditional, sometimes boring, one-long-sound-a-like song, generic blues thing. She plays boogie-woogie piano, which is never boring, and she has a hot three-piece band behind her.

“I like the blues, but I like traditional boogie-woogie too,” she said. “My music is American music, sort of a fusion of progressive boogie-woogie, jazz and blues. It makes my whole body say ‘Yeah!’ ”

American roots music, if that’s your job, translates into one thing--road trip. Forever on the road, Bogart has been everywhere, to the point where she knows where all the cool junk-food places are. She’s even been to the McDonald’s in Berlin.

“From this kind of music that hasn’t been mainstream or Top 40, it becomes sort of a cult thing,” she said. “In Europe, they’re totally appreciative of American music--perhaps it’s the freedom aspect of the music. I’ve been to places in East Germany where they have never seen an American.”

Then there was the time when it was so cold they could hardly play, and practice would be out of the question.

“We’ve had a couple of gigs that would make you think of ‘Spinal Tap,’ ” she said. “But probably the strangest was when we played a mining college in Montana outside in February. It was 8 degrees, but there were 600 people there. Everybody had to move just to keep warm.”

It will be considerably warmer at Alexander’s, where the show begins at 8 p.m.