¡Dos Amigos, Una Fiesta!

Old-time music – that pre-modern amalgam of all the most exciting bits of 19th and early 20th century enter¬tainment careering down an anything-goes highway to the nearest spit-and-sawdust saloon, with one foot on the accelerator and one foot in hellfire – means good-time music, frequently wild-time music. The Two Gentlemen gravitate to the wild side, having cut their teeth busking on New York City’s subways and parks. They have opened for Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and it’s hard not to imagine the road-hardened travellers lending an ear to ‘Me, I Get High on Reefer’ or ‘There’s Something in my Trousers.’

Tenor guitar, string bass, two voices and a drum – they keep it simple and straight, conjuring up a world of moonshine hooch and hot footwork. Their own songs channel a gas-lit posse of influences: from hot jazz to Tin Pan Alley and Western swing. Their lyrics have wit and grit amid the period-piece rhyme schemes and you can imagine how they open up the songs and the performance before an audience. Though they handle their instruments like dextrous cocktail makers, it’d be the live show I’d look to, rather than the record. This is great stuff for gatherings, though it’d be nice to hear a fiddle or two in there: perhaps they could become a League of Gentlemen.