MUSIC REVIEW : Leon Redbone Leaves Many Dumbfounded : Off-Beat: But just as many fans were delighted by musician’s odd bag of tricks.

“What was that?” the woman’s gesture asked. Standing near the back of the Belly Up Tavern late Monday night, she held her arms outstretched and her shoulders frozen in a shrug. It was her way of registering puzzlement over the concert Leon Redbone had just performed before a densely packed crowd of several hundred.

Others exiting the Solana Beach club were clearly pleased with the show, some were a bit grumpy, and a few seemed to take guilty delight in having shared their gullibility with others who might have a few bottles of unopened snake oil in their pantry.

Not knowing whether one should feel charmed, swindled, beguiled, transported, or anesthetized, the concert pretty much summed up Redbone’s effect on the contemporary music world the past 16 years. The purposely enigmatic performer has earned a handsome modern paycheck reviving vintage American music (1880-1940), all while revealing little of himself or his background.

On Monday, he offered nothing revelatory in a 70-minute set, much of it consumed by stretches of seemingly pointless inactivity and interjections of camp humor and arcane diversions.

Perhaps the less-amused in attendance simply wished the concert had lasted longer. But if Redbone picked his fans’ pockets, he did it with the same unerring sense of period style and idiosyncrasy that lured them there in the first place. Besides, an hour of delicate timbres, soporific tempos, dulcet murmurings and dead air is like a glass of warm milk, and one glass is more than sufficient.

Wearing his customary outfit of white Panama “ice cream suit,” matching fedora, and dark, round glasses, Redbone looked like Frank Zappa as a French Quarter dandy. His clothing provided a sharp contrast to the rather drab, suit-and-tie uniforms of his accompanists, who were fanned out on each side of him.

Although he has appreciable finger-style technique, Redbone doesn’t so much play the guitar strings as dust them. And, a subdued backing of drums (simple bass-and-snare setup, played with brushes), cornet (usually muted), clarinet and Dobro doesn’t generate much volume. So, it was obvious early on that the usual audience hubbub wouldn’t do. People sat quietly as Redbone performed a random sampling of the tunes he has almost single-handedly salvaged from the warehouse of musical Americana.

Shifting his baritone between a strangulated, trombone-like sing-speak and a Bing Crosby purr, Redbone did the 1883 minstrel song, “Polly Wolly Doodle.” He did “A Song of Hawaii,” a waltz-ballad given an extra flavor of Hawaiian slack-key guitar music by Dobroist Cyndi Cashdollar. He sang a somewhat somber “My Blue Heaven,” and a mid-tempo blues, “I’m Going Home,” from his current album, “Up a Lazy River.” He played the toe-tapper, “Diddy Wa Diddy.”

The songs were dispensed slowly, surrounded by slack time that had the surprising effect of maintaining an uneasy tension. Redbone softly yodeled, warble-whistled and moaned as his players added requisite touches of pizazz to a lazy-afternoon repertoire of riverboat jazz, back-porch blues, parlor folk and 78-r.p.m. crooner-pop.

The audience, which had more than a sprinkling of people old enough to remember some of these tunes in their original form, responded with enthusiasm. They laughed when Redbone interrupted the show to do shadow-puppets against the back wall of the stage. They groaned at canned jokes as old as the music, such as an exchange between Redbone and the cornetist about a visit to the doctor, in which the bandleader questioned the physician’s prescription because, “how can you take one pill three times a day?” They giggled when Redbone took a Polaroid snapshot of the gathering, then threatened to send it around to be autographed, advising fans to “write real small.”

What people filing out of the club had learned is that there really isn’t such a thing as a “good” or “bad” Redbone show. An archivist like Redbone merely services that anomalous need to be taken back to a simpler time. And if some of those present felt they’d only been taken, most appeared to have been well-serviced.