Scott Bradlee's Post Modern Jukebox: A Vintage Twist on Popular Music
Scott Bradley is a highly talented Jazz pianist who takes pop hits and sends them through a musical time machine for both fun and profit. Proving that everything new can be old again, pianist Bradlee has become a viral pop sensation after creating a series of clips for YouTube that finds him and his ad hoc group - The Postmodern Jukebox reworking 21st century pop hits in a variety of vintage styles -- transforming Miley Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" into a '50s-style doo wop number, giving Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" a '20s jazz accent, crossing Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" with Irish folk music, and showing how Ke$ha's "Die Young" would work as a classic country tune.
Bradlee was born in Long Island, New York, where he first fell in love with jazz at the age of 12 after hearing George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" for the first time. Bradlee became a successful performer, working in the New York jazz scene and forging a successful career playing supper clubs and night spots in the City. By his own admission, Bradlee regarded most pop and rock tunes as unrefined:
"Growing up as an aspiring jazz pianist, I wasn’t interested in listening to anything that might appeal to those that I deemed to possess a less than refined palette of musical taste. This willful ignorance continued for some time; then I decided to drop my preconceived notions and examine contemporary pop with an open mind. What I found is that, despite my initial aversion to the stuff I was hearing, I was unable to truly categorize this as “bad music” without first defining a set of arbitrary, culturally-defined criteria. Furthermore, the fact that such a rigorous vetting process exists for the output of major labels indicated that these songs and artists certainly RESONATED with the culture of our times–no easy feat, in and of itself. As a relentless devil’s advocate, I then found that by simply altering the context of such songs, I could find quite a bit of artistic merit inside of them."
In 2009, Bradlee released a digital single, "Hello My Ragtime '80s," in which he grafted familiar lines from 20 pop hits of the '80s into a medley played in traditional ragtime style. Bradlee then began experimenting with live mashups; during his weekly appearances at Robert Restaurant in the Big Apple's Columbus Circle, he would perform numbers that interpolated elements from popular tunes both past and present, and recordings of these experiments were compiled into a digital album, Mashups by Candlelight. The performances were popular enough that Bradlee released a second Mashups by Candlelight collection, but he enjoyed his greatest popular success when he began using his ideas as the basis for a series of YouTube videos.
In 2012, Bradlee got his first taste of viral success when he released A Motown Tribute to Nickelback, in which he and a handful of musicians and vocalists reworked a handful of tunes by the Canadian hard rock act into '60s-influenced R&B arrangements. Becoming more ambitious, Bradlee began working with a rotating group of musicians dubbed Postmodern Jukebox (often featuring vocalist Robyn Adele Anderson) who tackled Bradlee's arrangements which cast current pop songs in radically different styles, usually in live sessions filmed with a single camera in Bradlee's home. As Bradlee wrote on his website, "My goal with Postmodern Jukebox is to get my audience to think of songs not as rigid, ephemeral objects, but like malleable globs of Silly Putty. Songs can be twisted, shaped, and altered without losing their identities -- just as we grow, age, and expire without losing ours."
After Postmodern Jukebox's cover of "We Can't Stop" racked up over four million views on YouTube, Bradlee and his crew became official internet stars, appearing on the TV chat show "Good Morning America" and being interviewed on National Radio.
Among the group's prominent guest musicians are Dave Koz, who collaborated with them in a jazz covers of "Careless Whisper" and the Game of Thrones theme song, and Niia, who joined them for a "space jazz" version of "The End of the World". Postmodern Jukebox's October 2013 collaboration with Puddles Pity Party on a cover of Lorde's "Royals" generated particularly strong interest. As of September 2014, this video remained the second most popular on Bradlee's YouTube channel with over 8.7 million hits.
In 2013, Bradlee found interest from the video game industry, gaining a composer credit for 2K Games' BioShock Infinite. The soundtrack features four of the artist's stylized arrangements. He has arranged a piano cover of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (piano and vocals), a jazzy ragtime cover of Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love" (arrangement, piano) and covers of R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" (arrangement and piano) and "After You’ve Gone" (arrangement, piano).
In early September 2014, Bradlee uploaded a 1940s jazz interpretation of "All About That Bass", featuring Kate Davis singing solo while playing double bass; Bradlee played piano and Dave Tedeschi played drums on their version, called "All About That (Upright) Bass". The video received 8 million hits in three months.
By 2014, Bradlee's YouTube Channel was listed on New Media Rockstars Top 100 Channels, and ranked at #42
Now in 2015 Bradlee and Post Modern Jukebox are touring in the USA and in Europe.
"I want to contribute to the pop music lexicon in the best way that I can. I want to encourage others to push the boundaries of genres, and give them the tools to do so. Together, I want to create an alternate universe of popular song."
Find out more at the website postmodernjukebox.com and take a listen to some of Bradlee's brilliant arrangements on the Videos below:
SWEET CHILD 'O' MINE - GUNS AND ROSES COVER
CREEP - RADIOHEAD COVER
CARELESS WHISPER - GEORGE MICHAEL COVER
ALL OF ME - JOHN LEGEND COVER
