A pair of blithe and dapper chaps in vintage suits and hats sing in robust two-part harmonies, the one named Andy Bean (below right) taking lead vox and playing guitar and occasionally banjo, the other, Fuller Condon (aka “The Councilman,” left) plucking away on upright bass, both delivering performances with charismatic finesse and trading quickfire, seeming off-the-cuff repartee in the midst of much whistling, scatting, heel-kicking and foot-stomping.

The New York City acoustic duo is Two Man Gentlemen Band, its members neo-vaudevillian entertainers with matching offbeat wit and the ability to craft it into irreverent ditties within a 1920s and ‘30s-era stylistic framework, their sound drawing on Tin Pan Alley, classic rhythm and blues, Western swing, and hot jazz influences. They are inadvertent revivalists, however. According to Bean, “we just wrote some tunes and they sounded old fashioned ‘cause that’s what we were into, and then we just sort of ran with it.”

Subject matter ranges from historical – the Hindenburg disaster, the woes of Presidents William Howard Taft and Franklin Pierce, the former too fat for his own good, the latter too dependent on booze – to absurd, like upbeat numbers on drip-dryin’, chocolate milk, reefer, moonshine and fancy beer (a crowd favorite), or faux-balladry using mini-vans and sandwich-making in naughty metaphor (“I’ll be the bread, honey, you be the meat …”).

There’s virtually no research involved. Ideas for songs are spawned during those seemingly endless hours on the road (upwards of 200 days a year) as the Gents attempt to break the endless tedium by amusing each other. “Pretty much everything we’ve ever thought of comes at those times. We’re kind of mining our brains of everything we’ve ever learned.”

This article appears in Sep 23-29, 2010.