I'm an unabashed Pink Martini fan and have been ever since I heard the band in an NPR story a few years ago and went out of my way to special order its first CD "Sympathique," which you can find pretty easily now. What Pink Martini does is generally jazzy and when it's not you can count on it being interesting.
If Pink Martini went bad, I think it would end up as "Watermelon Slim & the Workers," the title of a great blues CD from Northern Blues, and the kind of blues often at the root of memorable jazz. From the looks of them, you probably wouldn't want to meet these guys in a dark alley, unless Slim, a member of Mensa with a journalism degree for gods' sake, was playing his "harp" and National Steel and singing songs like "Devil's Cadillac" in his voice that sounds about as bad as Tom Waits and gets the point across just as effectively. Then you'd stick around, after a side trip to the corner gin mill for a bottle, probably Red Rocket, and listen raptly. I just betchya there ain't many homages to Muddy, the Wolf, John Lee and B.B. sung in French.
Didn't find this one on NPR, but via The Roadhouse podcast from Tony Steidler-Dennison, one of my must-listen musical pleasures every week.
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