What is particularly refreshing is the mischief behind it all.  Abby DeWald (vocals, guitar) and Amanda Barret (vocals, mandolin, lead guitar) project the spirit of two girls playing dress-up.  They just happen to be incredibly adroit musicians.
The tautness of the backing band on Moon Over the Freeway, their most accomplished album, would put some old jazz cats to shame, and DeWald and Barret are blessed with a chemistry that is often hard to catch on tape even when it’s there.  Their sinewy voices, wrapped together in infectious old-timey harmony, wind through each music hall number with a kind of ironic confidence, like . . . well, girls that are too old to be playing dress-up, playing dress-up.

With little to no promotion from Warner Brothers, their label at the time (they are now doing self-releases), their songs stumbled onto several episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, currently a rite of passage for mainstream upstarts, and they have twice appeared on “Prarie Home Companion.”

As jazz audiences continue to dwindle, it would seem that groups like these are needed to bridge the gap between that most vulgar of conventions known as pop to other more classical forms which seem to be struggling with new models of consumption that pop music needn’t worry about.  In pop music, nothing is sacred, and as we are finding out, this includes the medium in which it is consumed. 

Rising to prominence when the phonographic design of home listening was aimed at recreating the live experience of catching a show at the music hall, jazz is experiencing homelessness in at least two contexts:  The instant gratification of the Digital Age and a kind of perverse gentrification.  No one actually sits down in the living room anymore and listens to their music, and venues that once could be identified as “jazz clubs” are forced to share the stage with more popular acts or else it’s curtains.  Furthermore, the democratization of the music industry that has seemingly liberated a whole slew of underground acts that would never have seen the light of day has not served jazz artists well. 

Without the benefit of the three-minute pop package, or at least the pretense of such a package, the internet must be the netherworld for jazz artists.  Which is ironic, since some of jazz’s most enduring heroes found the mainstream due to word-of-mouth, albeit on a micro scale compared to the power of the internet.

As is the case with any sinking enterprise, a creative solution is needed to right the ship.  The Ditty Bops’ bicycle tour and theatrical live shows--rumored to involve puppets--indicate a knack for thinking outside of the proverbial “box” that is needed to save increasingly obsolete forms.