Talk about cognitive dissonance: mink coats in the audience and suave, tuxedo’d, 64-year-old Italian crooner Paolo Conte on stage, all at that venerable rock-and-roll shithole the Orpheum Theatre, with its drab, cave-like lobby and perennial air of “restoration.”

That was a week ago Thursday, the beginning of an eight-date, two-week North American tour for Conte, an Asti-born lawyer-turned-composer-performer. His grizzled demeanor — gravelly voice, close-cropped gray hair, brush moustache — and quirky songwriting style force comparisons to all corners of cabaret and pop: Charles Aznavour, Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg, Tom Waits, the film music of Nino Rota. Despite the parallels in the folk and rock world, though, the heart of Conte’s music is in jazz and the flowering of the “Great American Songbook.” Even so, there’s no one quite like him.

At the Orpheum, he fronted a superb eight-piece band — three horns, an accordionist, bass, drums, and two guitars. Conte’s music hinted at specific subgenres while remaining clearly itself, segueing smoothly from tangos to boogie-woogie. With two acoustic guitars chugging chords in a medium-uptempo against the drummer’s whisking brushes and accordion obbligato, you could clearly hear Django Reinhardt’s Quintet of the Hot Club of France. One arrangement of 4/4 swing included breaks for New Orleans–style polyphony in the horn section. In some pieces, delicate jazz guitar chording gave way to rock-tinged Stratocaster rave-ups. And one sublimely arranged piece alternated galloping spaghetti-Western rhythm-guitar verses with odd-meter laughing klezmer clarinet choruses.

Conte performed mostly from behind a piano aimed at a 45-degree angle to the audience, singing Italian (and a touch of French), occasionally hunching a shoulder as he played, cueing that klezmer chorus with a quick “hallelujah” gesture with his hands, addressing the audience only to introduce one bandmember each between songs, acknowledging applause with a nod or by waving a finger in the air. The songs, despite the language barrier, were all accessible and hooky. The problem is, most “world music” translates because it’s dance music. Conte’s is music for the cabaret: it’s about the words. And maybe that’s why the audience extended only into the first few rows of the 2700-capacity Orpheum’s balcony. Nonetheless, Conte translated with his expressiveness, his piano playing, the sharpness of his band, the variety of the arrangements (including some elaborate setpieces for the horn section), and his European mix of the comic, the nostalgic, and the absurd. On some tunes he growled. On others he’d sing a few bars of scripted scat or play a bit of kazoo.

A few of Conte’s poetic lyrics are available in translation on his 1998 Nonesuch collection, The Best of Paolo Conte. One of his most beguiling, “Via con me” (“Come Away with Me”), he sang once in the first of his two sets and again as an encore, inviting the audience to sing along on the English chorus: “It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful/Good luck my baby . . . I dream of you . . . chips, chips du-du-du-du.”