Scott Bradlee’s life was changed by a piece of music. He had been a reluctant piano student who had no use for the minuets and sonatinas his teacher wanted him to learn. Practicing was a chore he found he could dispense with. After two fitful years, he quit taking lessons. But one day he heard a neighbor playing Rhapsody in Blue—this lit a fire under him. He returned to the piano, this time on his own, without a teacher. He forced himself to learn pieces that were beyond him, including, eventually, the Gershwin. Soon he was practicing three or four hours a day; then it would be eight. As he gained proficiency, the piano became for him “a portal to another universe.”
This sonic universe included early jazz-piano styles from ragtime to stride. Bradlee immersed himself in the rags of Scott Joplin and the recordings of Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and James P. Johnson. Soon his repertoire expanded to include current music popular among his friends. Hoping to impress them, he once boasted that he could take any song they could name and transform it into a piece of jazz. They challenged him with the Notorious B.I.G. rap song “Big Poppa.” In his new book Outside the Jukebox, Bradlee recalls what happened next:
Bradlee never forgot the delight he occasioned by mixing styles old and new.
The years that followed saw him graduate from high school, go to college to study music, and launch a career as a pianist in Hartford. Having achieved a degree of success, he decided to try his luck in New York City—but there he faltered. He was new in town, had no connections, and faced stiffer competition than he had expected. In time, through a combination of giving lessons and playing in restaurants and other venues, he was making enough money to pay his bills, but little more than that. It was a living if not exactly a life—or, rather, the life he had imagined.
Frustrated that he wasn’t making the progress he craved, Bradlee discovered a new interest, physics, and before long it absorbed him as music once had. In 2009, in his late 20s, he applied to college for a second round of undergraduate studies. He felt liberated, having decided to walk away from a career in music. Still, on a lark, remembering the pleasure he once gave his friends, he made a video of himself that spring playing a medley of pop hits from the 1980s interpreted in ragtime fashion. He posted it to YouTube. “Nothing,” he writes, “could have prepared me for what happened next.”
Overnight the video received 25,000 views and hundreds of comments. The view count doubled in a week. He recorded and posted more videos, refining his efforts, taking into account the comments he received, dropping what didn’t work, giving fans more of what they enjoyed. Soon a future in physics was abandoned as better piano gigs began to come his way. Through one of these he met his agent and was offered a chance to deliver a TEDx talk on music and technology. Success begat success. Quickly he was offered a job producing music for a video game, BioShock Infinite. As opportunities arose, he made good on them—and all along he kept grinding away, making and posting videos.
While working on one of his projects, Bradlee conceived the idea of Postmodern Jukebox, a music collective with a rotating cast of singers and instrumentalists that performs current hits in an array of anachronistic styles. Postmodern Jukebox’s breakthrough was a version of “Thrift Shop,” the 2012 song by the hip hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. A funny and catchy number to begin with, “Thrift Shop” was transformed by Bradlee and company into something straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a hot jazz number with an infectious, swinging beat. Bradlee describes setting up the recording equipment, running through the piece with the musicians, recording a good take, and celebrating with falafel sandwiches. After everyone left, he sat down to listen to the recording. “It occurred to me that we may have caught lightning in a bottle.” They had indeed: Overnight their version of “Thrift Shop” received more than 100,000 views. Before a week was out, it had been viewed a million times.
Many more videos followed, some of which have been watched tens of millions of times. Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” becomes a dramatic 1920s-style number with a tap dancer:
Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” gets a hopping treatment with Bradlee’s fingers scrambling up and down the keys. Blues singer Miche Braden belts out New Orleans-style renditions of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses and “Story of My Life” by One Direction. Even the songs that don’t work all that well musically score points for creativity and fun, like the makeover of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” in the style of the Beach Boys, complete with fake-theremin hijinks.
As Postmodern Jukebox became popular, tours followed—of Europe, Australia, North America, South America. Recording contracts were offered. Musicians clambered to sing or perform for Bradlee, who through it all kept working, kept making videos, devoting up to 80 hours a week to his many projects.
Bradlee is not the most graceful writer, but Outside the Jukebox will be of interest to up-and-coming musicians and Internet performers, not least because of his description of the traits and habits that helped him flourish. For example, as a pianist-for-hire in Hartford, he learned to read a room and tailor his set list according to the applause he received. Later, working at Robert, a restaurant in New York, he began streaming his performances over the Internet, gaining new listeners in the process. He was alert to celebrities patronizing the restaurant and would find clever ways of acknowledging them in song. (A visit from Alan Alda prompted Bradlee to play the M*A*S*H theme in no fewer than 14 styles. For this he received a $20 tip from Hawkeye himself.) As the leader of Postmodern Jukebox, Bradlee has learned how to judge and showcase the strengths of the musicians with whom he works.
He sprinkles advice to aspiring musicians throughout the book. Recalling his early experience with Rhapsody in Blue, he writes, “the very first step in learning any discipline is finding a way to get yourself feeling profoundly inspired and invested. . . . Unless you’re approaching your learning from a place of genuine inspiration, you’re probably going to have a hard time staying committed to the process, especially when the going gets tough.” Inspiration, though, amounts to little without desire: “Ambitious young people generally start off with a great deal of creative hunger, but as they age and experience tastes of success . . . the drive has a way of dissipating.” Here’s hoping that Bradlee’s hunger for success and his love of music keep him producing joyous, winning work for many years to come.
