Hank Kalet

THE first thing potential listeners need to know about the Two Man Gentlemen Band is that it is not a nostalgia act.

   The second thing listeners likely will learn, and rather quickly — whether they are listening to the band’s new CD, Drip Drying, or watching them live — is that the two-man band puts a premium on fun.

   The band — Andy Bean on banjo and guitar and Fuller Condon on upright bass — bills itself as a “two-man acoustic, Vaudeville spectacular” that combines hot jazz, old-time blues, rhythm and blues and country and Tin Pan Alley pop with a live show designed to get the audience jumping, shouting and dancing along. Audience participation, Mr. Bean says, is integral to the band’s sound.

   ”Mostly, we’re just a vocal duo, playing instruments and singing together,” Mr. Bean says. “You can only make a bit of a racket with two guys. The audience is the bigger band.”

   The band, nattily dressed in period suits from the 1920s and 1930s, performs a “few shout-alongs and things like that,” Mr. Bean says, “and we do like to banter with people. We are more than two people getting together and playing songs.”

   The band, which plays the Record Collector in Bordentown Nov. 6, formed about four years ago and has been touring for most of the last two. The pair started playing acoustic music in New York’s Central Park, mostly rockabilly and country, before moving into more “swingy stuff, like jazz and R&B.”

   ”In high school and college, both of us played in rock bands that weren’t very good,” Mr. Bean says. “We’ve found our niche now and much prefer this. It is easier on the ears, the acoustic music.”

   Mr. Dean says the pair learned a lot during its time in Central Park. They were what he called hardcore street musicians for about two years, playing about five days a week for six or so hours a day, which allowed them to develop “serious endurance.”

   ”For one thing, it teaches you how to accept rejection,” he says. “For every person who stops and gives you money, there are 100 that walk past. And we learned that when people aren’t paying attention, our feelings don’t get hurt.”

   Just as importantly, and maybe more so for the band’s live show, he says, “we learned to make a visual spectacle of ourselves. We are impeccably dressed, and we make broad gestures, which is really helpful. And we learned how to sing really loud.”

   Mr. Bean says the band didn’t make a conscious decision to focus on older styles or target a musical niche; rather, he and Mr. Condon always had been fans of older records and were just making the kind of music to which they listened. Their own record collections include early Louis Armstrong, Jellyroll Morton, the Mills Brothers and other jazz and blues records — thought they do not play music written by those legendary performers. The Two Man Gentlemen Band only plays originals.

   ”We’re not hardcore musicologists,” Mr. Bean says. “There are elements of all kinds of things in our music, so we’re not necessarily doing a period act. We happen to like old music, but we’re not doing this as a re-enactment or to be purists. We get around that by performing all of our own material. The songs are new, but there are a lot of old-fashioned aspects to them.”

   And a lot of humor. The band’s material includes songs about William Howard Taft and the Hindenburg disaster, paeans to the “joys of rabbit meat” and a tribute to the band’s minivan.

   ”We just write what we know,” he says. “Whatever comes up, we write a tune about it.”

   ”We’re in our own little world,” he adds a bit later, “where what we’re doing seems current and hip to what we like.”

   The band toured Europe earlier this year and was the opening act on the Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp tour — a career highlight that Mr. Bean hopes will introduce the band to a wider audience.

   ”Our little brand of Vaudeville swing music fit in nicely with Nelson’s band especially and with Dylan’s band, which is mostly a rock ‘n’ roll blues band,” he says. “They all like that kind of music and they are familiar with the American canon that we like. It worked out that the fans also seemed to be interested in that early American music.”

   Mr. Bean says the band is developing a nice following in its two years of nearly full-time traveling, which is important because “it wouldn’t be worth our gas money if people didn’t come back and see us.”

   The band records for the small independent label, Serious Records, which Mr. Bean describes as “almost a collective.”

   ”Given that we’ve been doing it ourselves in a grassroots way, I’m pleased with the way it’s come along,” he says. “We’re just going out and playing shows. It is the only thing we know how to do.”

   While “not completely do it yourself” — the band has a public relations person and someone to handle its booking — “the spirit is still there” in the band’s commitment to connecting to its audience.

   ”Fans know they can come up and talk to us after a show,” he says, “because we’ll probably be hanging out at the bar afterward.”

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  The Two Man Gentlemen Band will be at the Record Collector, 358 Farnsworth Ave., Bordentown, Nov. 5, 7:30 p.m. 609- 324-0880; www.the-record-collector.com. The Two Man Gentlemen Band: www.thetwogentlemen.com