THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Scott Bradlee was living in New York City, aiming to be a jazz musician, and not getting much work outside of restaurant gigs. A familiar tale. But one day he discovered a newfangled thing called YouTube and, to amuse himself, started uploading clips. The rest is history - a history that has attracted nearly 6 million subscribers and 2 billion (yes, billion!) views for his brainwave, Postmodern Jukebox.
Scott, what gave you the idea of Postmodern Jukebox?
I had a party trick, which was taking modern day songs and playing them how they would sound back in the ragtime or jazz eras. I started recording myself doing them and to my surprise the first video that I put up on YouTube went viral. I didn't really know what that meant, or how I could turn that into anything, but I started inviting my friends to my basement apartment in Queens. I'd just say, 'We're going to take a Lady Gaga song but we're gonna do it 1920s style', and they'd be like, 'Okay, sure'. 'And then we're gonna put it on YouTube'. 'What's YouTube?' 'Oh, it's crazy, you post things and people leave comments'. 'Okay, whatever...'
It was a very humble beginning, like most projects I guess, but I kept doing it, building an audience to the point that now we're in our ninth year of touring, which is really astonishing to me. We did our very first tour over in the UK in 2014. It's been a very rewarding journey, in terms of the massive community of fans and talent that we've kind of assembled. At this point we've featured well over 50 artists on our tours, and lots of them have gone on to have great careers of their own. And it's been a really, really fun project to be a part of.
I counted the total numbers that have recorded and toured with Postmodern Jukebox and they amount to 96 vocalists and 44 musicians!
Probably! And we've toured every continent except for Antarctica.
How does it work? You have two tours on at the same time at the moment, in Europe and the States.
We have a fairly big roster, and what I'm trying to do when we send out these tours is to get a balanced cast, where they can cover all different styles. If you've seen our channel, you'll know we do, not just jazz and swing, but some Motown, country and western, everything going all the way back to the 1920s. In order to represent what we do on the channel, we have to travel with a pretty big cast. We'll bring out a dozen performers, great vocalists and musicians, and we have a tap dancer that tours with us as well. We're going to take you on a journey through all the eras, with a twist that you'll know the songs that we're covering because they're the biggest hits of the last 30 years.
For some people it's a gateway into these old styles. For some older folks it's a trip down memory lane. And then for the really young folks, it's a chance to hear a Miley Cyrus song but flipped in a completely different way. And it's a chance to dress up in vintage clothes and have some fun.
I love that you have Taylor Swift in a bebop style, and a Metallica song as a soul ballad. And you make them sound like they're the originals.
Yeah, Metallica's 'Nothing Else Matters', sung by Tia Simone - she does it with us live too. She's on our current UK and Europe tour, and she's such an incredible performer, people are speechless by the end of that.
Does she do the splits every time, like on YouTube?
Every time!
Do you play on most of the videos?
Yeah, but really my passion is doing the arrangements. My main thing is producing, arranging and directing the tours.
With electro swing and things like that, people take old music and do it in a new style. You've flipped that?
Yeah, it's kind of the reverse of that.
Do people tell you they've discovered bebop or some other musical style through listening to you?
Yes, and the crazy thing is that now we're starting to work with singers that remember PMJ from when they were kids, when they were growing up and discovering music. Just recently a really talented jazz singer told us that they got into jazz because PMJ showed that it was cool to like these old styles of music. The greatest compliment to a musician is to be able to inspire somebody else to go on their own journey as a musician. That's really cool.
How did you get into jazz? It wasn't perhaps the most obvious genre of music for a youngster to play.
For me, it was through Rhapsody in Blue. I took classical piano lessons and I wasn't very good at it. And I didn't like it that much. I wanted to do anything but practice the piano. My teacher actually dropped me as a student, I just wasn't taking to it. I had dismissed piano, I thought it was boring, but then I heard Rhapsody in Blue and it was being played in this way that sounded really exciting. It had the classical sound that I knew, but then it had this other bluesy kind of sound. I later found out that was jazz. So I started going to my local library and reading everything I could about it, starting with George Gershwin, then finding his influences and learning about Scott Joplin and ragtime, then James P. Johnson and Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington... One thing led to another.
The beautiful thing about jazz is, every practitioner puts their own spin on the art form, so it's a living, breathing thing. And to this day, jazz continues to develop, its influence is felt in all these different genres of music, from pop to Latin to… everything! It was a really organic education, in that sense. It was a lot of listening, a lot of reading, and a lot of trial and error, just trying things out on the piano, trying to see what works and trying to get all the sounds that were in my ear into the piano.
Did you have any musical background in your family?
Both my parents played musical instruments and sang, and I had a grandmother that played classical piano, but I was the only one that was into jazz. That was the music that spoke to me, for whatever reason. I guess we can never figure out why these things happen, but it was definitely jazz that got me interested in music.
I love that PMJ started as a bit of fun, but you take the music seriously, like in 'Heroes', the David Bowie song, sung by Nicole Atkins.
Absolutely. Our thing is different than a parody. We really try to do honest representations of how these songs would've sounded back in the day. That usually starts with the song selection. I'll look at the lyrics, or other elements in the song that might be evocative of an earlier era, to determine where we're going to put that song. So for instance, 'Sweet Child of Mine' – if you strip away Axl Rose and the guitars and just look at the lyrics it's got a blues-folk quality. When we did our version, we brought in this amazing blues singer named Miche Braden, and she took it back to the era of Bessie Smith, it's a real New Orleans blues. When you listen to it, even if you're aware that it's a Guns N' Roses song, you think wait a minute, is this actually an older song?
Do you think if a song is a good song, it can be done in any style?
There are songs that are specifically written for a certain genre, and they can't really move outside of that very easily. And that's fine, they're still great songs, it's just their preferred medium. But I'd say that a lot of the songs that stand the test of time are constantly being played in different styles. There are so many universals in the way that they're written, they can lend themselves to different settings and styles and interpretations. And each one will reveal something new about the character of the songs.
Have you had any feedback from the original artists that you've covered?
All the time! Really cool ones too. Recently, Billy Idol shared our cover. Salt and Pepper shared our cover of 'Shoop'. Beyoncé was, I think, the first artist to share one of our covers. It's cool to have them in the conversation too.
You drop a new video on YouTube every week or so, and you have 1.9 billion views and 8.5 million subscribers. Most people would kill for those numbers!
It's crazy, and it's funny to think back to when I had one subscriber. It's been pretty much entirely word of mouth. There's no major label backing us or anything like that. This is a pretty grassroots kind of indie act. We really rely on the fans, people seeing something thinking it's cool enough to share with somebody else.
You play some fantastic places, venues like Radio City Music Hall, Red Rocks, Sydney Opera House... Have you got a favorite venue?
Radio City was, for me, the one that really stood out, because I remember it when I was a kid. New York was my favorite city, growing up. I lived in New Jersey, and I would take the train on weekends, and we'd walk around and look at all the music venues. We walked by Radio City, and you'd see the marquee and everything, it was so timeless. It was a nice full circle moment to be on that stage.
You'll have to get the Rockettes next time you play there.
Absolutely!
When you're on tour, do you get the chance to go out and see the cities that you visit?
Sometimes. I try to see some stuff, it always makes it more fun when you get to meet the local people. I know our cast definitely does, after the show they'll go to the local pubs and hang out with the people. It's a great way to experience things, especially in a place like Europe, where you're waking up in a different country every day on tour. It's like a little sample pack, you get to see all these different countries, then get to go back in another year.
I'd like to sign off with a question that we ask at the end of most of our interviews. What's the best thing about being Scott Bradlee?
That's a tough one, right? Well, I feel very blessed that as a musician, I get to work with so many talented people, incredible singers and musicians and tap dancers, every day. You're living a blessed life if you get to wake up every day and do what you love.
