(05-14-2015, 06:34 PM)john Wrote: PMJ Promo piece

What is Postmodern Jukebox??

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(05-17-2015, 07:33 AM)riley Wrote: I just watched this, got the impression it was timed with the Billboard Music Awards coming up. I saw a tweet that ABC had PMJ on some promo ad for the Billboard Awards and Haley was on it .

Quote:scottbradlee
The moment when one of our meet and greet fans realized that @adamkubota_bass was her high school prom date. #pmjtour

Quote:Take a spin on Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox

Six years ago, Scott Bradlee stood on the edge of giving up. The piano virtuoso with a passion for jazz had a unique gift for the world, but he couldn't push it past New York. His dream appeared to be over until the day he sat down, looked back on the music he created and opened his mail.

Bradlee is the leader of Postmodern Jukebox. The New York group gives modern pop a boost of vintage pizzazz. They've doo-wopped Miley Cyrus, jazzed up Macklemore and orchestrated a Motown tribute to Nickleback. Artists from Taylor Swift to Kanye West have received classic makeovers.

Tuesday, the group's North American tour hits Vinyl Music Hall, 2 Palafox Place.

Postmodern Jukebox has become an international sensation, but it wasn't so smooth for Bradlee in the beginning.

"It was really tough," he said. "I couldn't find any gigs."

Whenever he found work, it was as piano-man background music. Even in New York's most notable venues, his music was lost in the shuffle. At his lowest point, Bradlee believed that music was something he could do on the side. He got a job as a music teacher and considered going back to school to study physics.

But his future changed one day in 2009 when he checked his computer.

As Bradlee watched, emails filled his screen. Each one was a notification from YouTube. Five hours earlier, he posted his first video on the popular site. The short clip, "Hello My Ragtime '80s," featured Bradlee playing a ragtime medley of '80s hits by Bon Jovi, Journey and more. The video was an instant hit.

"YouTube would send you an email every time someone commented on a video," he said. "I remember looking and I just saw that there were tons of comments, page after page of comments and I was trying to think, 'What happened?' "

He thought it was a mistake. The video had 60 views earlier, but when he checked the site this time, it had more than 12,000.

The moment showed Bradlee that there was a market for his vision. It became his mission to fulfill the demand.

"It was up to me to find the right team, the right kind of people that could bring these ideas to life and present them," he said. "And that's what the past five years have really been about."

Bradlee found his elite players, and Postmodern Jukebox is ready to go global. Next year, the band will step out with a UK/European tour.

"We've crafted this variety show where I'm bringing some of the best vocalists and musicians in the world and we're putting pop music in a time machine for a great celebration of past and present music styles," Bradlee said. "I want to make it so that everybody in the world can experience."


Want to go?

•WHAT: Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox.

•WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday.

•WHERE: Vinyl Music Hall, 2 Palafox Place.

http://www.pnj.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/05/22/take-spin-scott-bradlees-postmodern-jukebox/27788655/

(12-03-2014, 06:32 PM)john Wrote: SCOTT BRADLEE & POSTMODERN JUKEBOX

...But as far as the fans are concerned, it’s just fun (and sometimes funny). Bradlee himself will tell you, simply, “I reimagine a song in another style because I want to hear it that way.”

....This proximity of Bradlee’s outfit to Waller is particularly fitting; the former, a self-taught jazz pianist, considers the latter, an innovator of the Harlem stride style who helped lay the groundwork for modern jazz piano, a key influence, as is Jellyroll Morton, James P. Johnson and Art Tatum.

Which isn’t to discount the importance to Bradlee’s development of Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” the vinyl incarnation of which was, he says, “the first album I ever loved.” That was when he was six, growing up in Pattenburg, New Jersey, where he moved at four from Nesconset, New York. He took piano lessons, but they didn’t take. Then, at age 12, Bradlee heard “Rhapsody in Blue” and was forever changed. “I got the sheet music and taught myself how to play it,” he recalls. “I started wondering, ‘Where does this come from? What else sounds like this?’”

Asked what appealed to him about the popular music of the 1920s, ragtime especially, he says, “I could play it fast and loud. It was brash. And it had contempt for rules, which really appealed to me.”

...He pursued Jazz Studies at the University of Hartford, then moved to New York to become a starving artist. He booked gigs, but as he puts it, “Jazz pianists are a dime a dozen in New York City.” ...

Bradlee’s first video was straight-up jazz. He didn’t have much footage of himself, however, so he decided to try a video experiment of his own: a ragtime medley of ’80s pop. He managed to amass 100 views. But through one of those viewers, Neil Gaiman discovered him. The author tweeted Bradlee’s flying fingers to his millions-strong Twitter following. Within a week, Bradlee reports, “more people had seen that video than had seen me play live my entire life.”

....How does he come up with this stuff? “A lot of pop songs are constructed of elements that lend themselves to a certain feel,” he points out. “The simple progression of the bass line in ‘Blurred Lines,’ for instance, reminded me of bluegrass. ‘Sweet Child’ sounds like an old blues song – the structure, the way the chorus repeats …” With Cyrus, it was more an instance of tongue-in-cheeky cultural criticism: “She’d gained all that notoriety from her 2013 VMA appearance. I had to recast her song for the ’50s, which everyone thinks of as this squeaky-clean era.”

Then there were the gifts from the pop-music gods, like Meghan Trainor’s #1 hit “All About That Bass.” Bradlee knew a musician-singer named Kate Davis. “I’d wanted to do something with Kate for a while,” he reveals, “but I was waiting for the right song to come along.” Check the PMJ video for “All About That Bass” and you’ll find Davis singing – and playing stand-up bass. If you do click there, you’ll be in good company: 3.5 million views and counting.

The mashup of Davis and Trainor is some good old-fashioned A&R. The repertoire Bradlee selects for PMJ’s vocal artists has furnished a platform for some very talented but previously little-known performers. And it’s not just the eyeballs afforded by YouTube; Bradlee provides an intuitive musical context for the singular gifts of these singers that allows them to be seen in a new light – it’s as if he’s somehow cracked the code to their essential appeal.

...Discovering talent and knowing what to do with it is fundamental to the business of music. Bradlee is something of a postmodernist here, too, having achieved renown doing everything himself, mostly online, “with no budget” (i.e. using the recording equipment he’d had since college). His adherence to the DIY ethos also suggests the decidedly postmodern form of punk rock. “I was a struggling jazz pianist sitting in my basement apartment in Queens,” he attests, “but I just figured it out and made it happen.”...


http://postmodernjukebox.com/biography/

Quote:I find the physics interest fascinating -- Scott strikes me as that kind of guy. Very bright and probably very good at math. The latter ability may relate to his skills at re-arranging songs -- coordinating lots of moving parts in a coherent way.

Quote:Asked what appealed to him about the popular music of the 1920s, ragtime especially, he says, “I could play it fast and loud. It was brash. And it had contempt for rules, which really appealed to me.”

Quote:Scott Bradlee ‏@scottbradlee 18m18 minutes ago
I love reading tweets from people that are discovering Postmodern Jukebox for the first time

(05-26-2015, 12:46 PM)john Wrote:

Quote:Scott Bradlee ‏@scottbradlee 18m18 minutes ago
I love reading tweets from people that are discovering Postmodern Jukebox for the first time

Me too, especially if they're having a Haley wtf moment

Quote:HER FREAKING VOICE SLAYS THE CRAP OUT OF ME WOW