Raabe may look like a character out of "Cabaret," but for him, there's nothing nostalgic about his act.

"No, never, never, never," says the Berlin vocalist, who brings his sensational 12-piece Palast Orchester to Oakland's palatial Paramount Theatre next Saturday on a San Francisco Jazz Festival bill. "For me nostalgia means 'let's dream back to a better time, a golden age.' But it wasn't golden, of course. This music is good, and there's something in it that's timeless."

Raabe's orchestra plays stock dance-band arrangements from sheet music found in flea markets and archives or transcribed from 78 rpm records, and it specializes in smart songs written in the 1920s and '30s for revues, theater and film. He mixes German numbers from the artistically fertile Weimar period, among them "Du Bist Meine Greta Garbo" (You Are My Greta Garbo) by Robert Stolz and Walter Reisch, with American hits like Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek."

The music speaks to contemporary audiences because "the problems in these songs are timeless," says Raabe, 45, on the phone from Madison, Wis., the first stop on a 12-city American tour. "Love, hate, to find a girl, to lose somebody. There's this humor, this black humor. You know there are problems, but the songs give you a chance to laugh about them, or to take them not so seriously. The German songs from this time had a very ironic and black humor. It was gone after 1933, when the Nazis came to power. It had an intelligent quality. For me, it's the most elegant kind of pop music."

Entranced by the music

Raabe fell in love with these songs as a kid growing up in the Westphalian town of Lünen, where he sang in the church choir. He was entranced by the jazzy two-beat bounce of the old dance music he heard on the radio. His parents owned a 78 recording that floored him - "Crazy for Hilde," a fast foxtrot played by an English dance band.

"It was a very funny song, but in a way it was sad," Raabe says. "It was funny and melancholy. This is the main thing with my music - it's both. I was touched deeply by this instrumentation, by the character of the songs."

Raabe, who sings in a pure, airy baritone that occasionally sails into falsetto, set out to be an opera singer. He studied for seven years at the Berlin University of the Arts. To pay for school, he and some musician friends formed the Palast Orchester (Palace Orchestra) and began playing their stylishly retro music around Berlin. Many of the original musicians are still with the band, a brilliant ensemble of multi-instrumentalists who play with precision, subtlety and power (the bassist doubles on sousaphone, the trumpeters sing, and the guitarist also plays violin and banjo).

"In my deepest heart, I always wanted to go onstage with music like this," the singer says. He was influenced by many singers of the 1920s and '30s, he says, but "I have no special hero." Pressed, he allows that he was big on Fred Astaire, and "what's his name?" he asks, breaking into "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime."

Yes, "Dean Martin. I like his style very much, but I could never sing like him. I don't want to sing like him."

He sums up his stage and singing style with a single phrase: Less is more.

"I don't jump around onstage," Raabe says. "Backstage maybe, but never onstage," he adds with the wry tone of his tune introductions, with their Dracula-like diction and deft comic timing ("And now a waltz. It is not as elegant as a waltz from Vienna. But much louder.")

"My philosophy is, don't do much onstage. I hate singers who touch their heart when they sing about love, or look to the ceiling when they're singing about heaven. I don't have to knock on the head of the audience that love can hurt. They know from their own experience."

Raabe's style may seem arch, but it's never campy. There are no boas on stage, he notes, and he doesn't wear a monocle. As the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in a review of the singer's Carnegie Hall concert last year, Raabe "comes across as a wised-up choirboy with a slightly seductive glint in his eye."

'Gorilla Has a Villa'

One of the songs on the Palaster Orchester's recent CD, "Heute Nacht Oder Nie" (Tonight or Never), recorded live at Carnegie, is "Mein Gorilla Hat 'Ne Villa Im Zoo" (My Gorilla Has a Villa in the Zoo). The music was co-written by Bronislaw Kaper, a prolific composer who wrote the tune "San Francisco" for the 1936 MGM musical of the same name starring Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. Raabe says he'll probably sing "San Francisco" here. But he's not sure whether the band will do its deadpan version of Tom Jones' "Sex Bomb," which appears on YouTube.

"That was just a joke," says the singer, who's also been known to leaven his Brecht with a little Britney Spears. "We travel around a lot together and sometimes we have ideas. Sometimes bad ideas, sometimes funny ideas. We had the idea to play the songs of the day in our style, like 'Oops, I Did It Again.' We can do it. But our main thing is the music of the '20s and '30s."

Max Raabe and Palast Orchester perform at 8 p.m. next Saturday at the Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway in Oakland. $25-$75. (866) 920-5299, www.sfjazz.org.

E-mail Jesse Hamlin at jhamlin@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle