Jazz might not be dead, but to most, the frenetic riffs of a Charlie Parker sax solo could just as well be the droning bleats of a terminal patient on life support.
Tyler Ryan Miller and Gillian Howe of Tumbledown House are trying to change that perception.
While the Bay Area duo specializes in sound-tracking the back-alley dice games and speakeasy secret handshakes from the Prohibition era, it's also manipulating the bygone music to appeal to a new generation.
The band is working on songs for an EP of electro swing, which combines classic jazz and swing with hip-hop and house music, making it dance club-friendly.
"I want to make it fun and accessible," Miller said. "I want it to be party music, not this stuffy thing where you pay $40 for your filet mignon and clap politely for every solo."
Often in the genre, older songs are sampled, but Miller has been able to take Tumbledown House songs and work them into electro swing songs.
"It's the perfect modern evolution of this jazz," Howe said.
The band has been slowly working some of the songs into its live sets.
"It's radically different and super fun," Miller said. "It's not going to be our main thing, but we're doing an EP and going to release that in the next couple of months."
Miller and Howe met in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-2000s.
"I'd written some songs myself and had played them in front of people a few times and it went terribly," Howe said.
But in teaming with Miller, who studied guitar at Arizona State University, Howe was able to concentrate on singing. The two connected over an infatuation with history -- especially the lecherous and tawdry tales of the Wild West and Roaring '20s.
"Gambling, murder, prostitution -- we were both pretty taken by those eras," Howe said. "We became enraptured and started studying and diving into it. The real facts of those times are better than any fiction."
By blending those themes, Miller's jazz education and Howe's background growing up in rural Montana, the duo began to develop their "saloon jazz" sound when they moved to Bozeman, Montana.
"The rural landscape and that Wild West frontier mentality, it made sense with this jazz background I had," Miller said. "It wasn't with a specific genre in mind, that's just what came out. It's pseudo-jazz, this super weird brand that came out. We struggled with how to identify it and what to call it."
The band released a self-titled debut in 2009 and in 2012 produced "Fables and Falsehoods," which showcased a number of original songs, many cleverly penned by Howe.
"Gillian has a real tact with melody and lyrics," Miller said. "She'll bring me a fully polished vocal melody with a theme. All I need to do is put some chords in and work out an arrangement. Most of our successful songs from the past have come from Gillian's weirdo brain."
The band is making its eighth tour of Alaska over the last handful of years.
"We write weird songs about weird stuff," Howe said. "What better place to go? Our type of weird seems to work well with Alaska's type of weird."
They had some trepidation playing at a festival on the band's first trip to the state.
"We thought people were going to physically harm us for not playing bluegrass," Howe joked. "They were actually going to beat us for playing something jazzy. By the third set they were crowd-surfing and buying us shots. We ended up feeling like rock stars. Now that we've come up here five, six years, we have some great, great friends."
Included in that group are some of the Alaska musicians who will join them at Thursday's show at Tap Root Public House: Logan Bean on trumpet, Joe Eunice on bass and Brandon Cockburn on drums.
The band will play a set of jazz standards to be followed by a pair of Tumbledown House sets.
Tumbledown House
8 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13, at Tap Root Public House, Anchorage
Tickets: $10 at taprootalaska.com
10 p.m. Friday, Aug. 14, Kharacters Bar, Homer
8 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 16, Kingfisher Roadhouse, Cooper Landing