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Here's a fact that isn't actually a news flash: I love music.

I love it so much that it's a bitter irony that I seem to have been born with no overweening talent for it (my enthusiastic bongo banging aside). But as a good friend — a professional singer — told me, folks like me are as necessary as those gifted few who can make the music, because without an audience, it's like the tree falling in the forest.

I love music because I love to dance, love to just feel the rhythm. I also love songs with insightful lyrics, ones that help me understand myself or my world. I love the fact that music can take you someplace else, to a memory or even a dream, or just another state of mind.

And I love that music has a power all its own — to connect people across all divides. The best recent example of that, to me, has been evidenced in the post-Katrina devastation of New Orleans, which has uprooted that city's many musicians — still — and left them homeless, both literally and in their art.

People — both musicians and laymen — have reached out to many of these displaced artists and found them a temporary home and audience; people like Marco Island institution Bobby Gideons, who lately plays his regular Old Marco Inn gigs side by side with one such uprooted musician, banjo and guitar player Bob Leary.

Leary was a musician on the famous Mississippi Queen riverboat. But when the boat went out of commission indefinitely following Katrina, a whole host of players who'd gotten their income and benefits as its employees were left adrift. Gideons stepped in and offered Leary enough regular gigs with him at the Old Marco Inn to keep him working.

If you've seen Gideons play before — and if you've lived here or visited for any length of time, I'm banking that you have — you're already aware that he's a talented keyboard player who knows his audience and knows how to put on a show. The 71-year-old musician can bang out anything from jazz to rag to Dixieland to the classics, always with an enormous smile on his face that tells you he loves what he does.

With the addition of Leary, Gideons cedes lead singing duties to him and frees himself to play around on the keys — both sets of them. Gideons plays two keyboards — simultaneously, one with each hand — to give himself a sound that includes melody and bass line. Leary accompanies him alternately with his guitar and his banjo.

Leary and Gideons are well matched — not just musically, but personality wise. One of the things that always makes Gideons's shows so engaging is his demeanor: riffing with his audience, goofing with certain songs and intros, showboating musically with complicated, double-time piano playing.

Leary goes with that flow, cracking jokes and good-naturedly hounding the audience: "Anyone who can't dance to the next song, they ought to just start shoveling dirt on you right now," is his intro for the Platters' Only You.

And listen close during the songs, because Leary's likely to start changing lyrics, like in the fifties hit You're Sixteen ("You're Beautiful and You're Mine"), when he tags on, "You're pregnant ... and it's mine"; or in That's Amore, whose chorus becomes, "When she says, 'What the hell; let's go get a motel,' that's amore ..." But don't think it's all fun and games. Yes, you will smile ear to ear most of the night, but it's as likely to be because of the men's talent as their antics. Gideons is simply a master of the keyboard, with an incredible repertoire and endless stores of energy. Leary is a perfect counterpoint on guitar, making the sound rich and layered without overpowering or detracting from the whole.

And on banjo he's deft and versatile, switching styles from a bluegrassy twang to a bluesy Mississippi Delta sound to a bouncy Italian string effect. His singing voice has equal range — his upper register is a pure vibrato on songs like If I Didn't Care by the Ink Spots; but he'll grind out a lower tone too, with a rich, deep Can't Help Falling in Love or a solidly sung Mack the Knife.

The duo are billing their Thursday-night shows as fifties and sixties, and you will indeed get a preponderance of music from that era. But they'll stretch the definition quite a bit in their wide variety of music. "We're going to the sixties now," says Leary — "the 1860s." And the two launch into a medley of rag.

By the middle of the evening, it's standing room only, with diners drawn in from the adjacent restaurant by the music and the loud crowd response to hover in the archways or join in the dancing. Like Gideons's solo shows, there's no break, it's just a nonstop night of music, dancing and fun.

Gideons and Leary play together in the piano bar Wednesdays and Fridays beginning at five for happy hour; Thursday nights are 1950s-and-1960s themed, and begin at 7 p.m. On Mondays Leary joins Gideons's fabulous Big Band evening in the Crystal Ballroom; and Tuesdays he plays in the Dixieland band there. You can see the hardworking Gideons solo in the piano bar on Saturdays and Sundays.