The Whiffenpoofs at the American Center. (Sayantan Ghosh)

More than 100 years old, and still going strong. That’s the Whiffenpoofs for you. Whiffen-who? For the uninitiated, it’s a band of 14 singers from Yale University that’s become an institution.

Calcuttans got a taste of a cappella (a style of purely vocal music) on Thursday evening at the American Center, where the group gave a concert.

The Whiffenpoofs started out in 1909, when a group of five young men from the university met at the Mory’s Temple Bar in New Haven, Connecticut. The group started meeting every week at Mory’s, improvising harmonies to the songs they loved so well. It was these weekly meetings that soon became a hallowed tradition.

Why such a curious name? Ben Wexler, one of the Whiffenpoofs and a music major at Yale, said: “Back then, some Yale boys had gone to watch a show on Broadway called Little Nemo, which had two men arguing about catching a half-fish half-dragon called the Whiffenpoof, which swims in a pool of whisky! The boys were looking for a name for the group and decided to call it that. We’ve stuck to the name for over a hundred years.”

The Whiffenpoofs’ appearance is deceptive. They may be dressed like dandies in tailcoats, white gloves and bow-ties, but their repertoire includes a diverse mix of traditional Yale songs, original compositions and even reworked covers of popular jazz, gospel and soul numbers.

“We’ve recently opened up to include modern pop, jazz and music from the Seventies,” said Andrew Maillett, another Whiffenpoof. But they are strict about one thing: they remain “strictly a cappella”.

After the introductions, during which one of them claimed to be a “double major in robotics and romance because I want to grow up to be a love machine”, while another bluntly said “I don’t want to grow up”, the Whiffenpoofs paraded on stage with a traditional Bohemian marching song.

Their performance included a 1950s Kurt Weill song, the popular British song A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer and even the gospel hymn, When The Saints Go Marching In.

Each of the 14 members took turns to step forward and sing as the rest went a cappella, with their high-pitched notes and baritones blending perfectly to form the background.

The concert ended with The Whiffenpoof Song, the group’s signature ballad that has been recorded by, among others, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong.