Bill Murray a true showman in old-school performance at Toronto's Koerner Hall

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In closing his address at Koerner Hall's gala season opener on Oct. 13, Royal Conservatory of Music CEO Peter Simon promised the audience something "a little different" for the night's entertainment. Different is exactly what it was.

What happened was essentially a live presentation of the new album New Worlds, an eloquent, entertaining and unexpected collaboration between the actor Bill Murray and the German-American cellist Jan Vogler. The two struck up a friendship and eventually a creative partnership that resulted in a collection of ensemble music, standards and literary readings, credited to Bill Murray, Jan Vogler and Friends.

"It was a fantastic, creative process," Vogler told The Globe and Mail in advance of the concert. "We met and talked about music first, before going into literature. The idea was to build a bridge between spoken word and music. The bridge is that Bill can sing so well."

At the Koerner Hall performance of New Worlds, Murray tidily read an excerpt from an interview with Ernest Hemingway published in the Paris Review. Later he went full-bore theatrical in his recital of a chapter from Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast. To Astor Piazzolla's mournful tango Oblivion, he danced somberly with violinist Mira Wang (Vogler's wife).

Murray left the lectern to sit obscured in the back while Vogler, Wang and pianist Vanessa Perez offered Piazzolla's La muerte del ángel. He laughed and smiled with great appreciation at pianist Perez's glissando. The crowd concurred.

The prancing comedian giddily proclaimed the sentiment of I Feel Pretty (from West Side Story), though his craggy 67-year-old face did not agree. When he sang Van Morrison's When Will I Ever Learn to Live with God, he did so with full-throated gusto and gospel-music verve.

Whether reading Twain or reciting Thurber or doing Durante, Murray proceeded in the way one should do the hokey pokey: He put his whole self in and he took his whole self out. The comedian and actor can now add "showman" to his list of occupations.

All told, it was quite a program: Bach here, Shostakovich there; some allegro, with earnest meditation too. "Whoever you are come travel with me," Murray requested of his audience, using Walt Whitman's words. "Travelling with me you find what never tires."

Spot on. The evening's journey was unpredictable and affecting – old-fashioned entertainment that was sophisticated but with zip and heart. Think of it as A Prairie Home Companion for the tuxedo set.

Vogler and Murray had spoken to The Globe while they drove through the California desert. When Vogler passed the phone to Murray, the actor immediately introduced another member of the group. "Sitting right behind me is Vanessa Perez," he said. "Do you want to meet a pretty piano player?"

Murray clearly digs the camaraderie of the project. "Give me something that's good and some people that I can work with on it, and something will come of it." Asked about the musicians with him, he turned humble. "Well, let's say their reflected light is very flattering to me."

The album aims to showcase American ideals. "It all speaks to us," Vogler said of the tracklist that includes the Gershwins' It Ain't Necessarily So from the opera Porgy & Bess and a reading from James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer. "We feel the material has the kind of values that shaped our democracy in a way."

The album closes with America from West Side Story. At Koerner Hall, Murray leaned into one line in particular: "Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico's in America!" The Canadian audience understood what the White House seems to resist.

In the same week a Mississippi school district removed Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird from the junior-high reading list because the racially charged novel "makes people uncomfortable," Murray and Vogler are touring North America with a show that includes a passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that is purposely uncomfortable.

An encore at Koerner Hall included a version of The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond. At one point, Murray asked the audience to "walk with me," which meant to sing along with him on the Scottish traditional, which is what took place. After, Murray was given a bouquet of roses, which he threw into the audience stem by stem as he made his way through aisles and up and down rows.

He made quite a show of it. At one point he stood on a chair in order to toss a stem to the second balcony. Earlier Murray had read Hemingway: "They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

If the point was missed when he read it, it was well taken by the end of the performance.