Getting The World Excited About Jazz & Ragtime

Scott Bradlee's affinity for jazz piano understandably meant that he wasn't the most popular kid in school. But the idea he came up with to win brownie points with his peers began a surprisingly short journey to becoming one of the most popular music channels on YouTube.

"So many people were sharing it and thinking that this was the original version of that Justin Bieber song; that Justin Bieber had covered this song that was actually from the 1920s."

"I loved all these older styles of music and my friends were not into that kind of music at all," laughs Bradlee. "They were in to gangsta rap or pop or whatever, the stuff people listen to in high school. So to kind of relate to them and their world I used to take the songs that they loved and I would play them as jazz or ragtime and stuff, and it became kind of like a fun party trick in a way." A few years down the track while struggling to make ends meet as a jazz pianist in New York City — "it was really hard to get people excited about jazz!" — Bradlee decided to pop one of these tracks on this newfangled platform called YouTube. "YouTube was kinda a new thing, and I decided to put my music out there and I recorded versions of me taking all these big songs from the '80s — Bon Jovi, Michael Jackson — and play them as ragtime piano. And the very next day Neil Gaiman, the writer, Tweeted it to all his followers and I started getting tonnes of hits. I didn't know what a viral video was, but I had a viral video!"

These days, Postmodern Jukebox is practically an institution, playing shows on four continents, hosting over two million YouTube subscribers and clocking "about 150 or something" songs on iTunes — "most artists do like an album a year or every two years and last year I think I did like, seven or something". It's music that makes you nostalgic for a time that you didn't live through, and Bradlee explains a few of his favourites. "We took We Can't Stop, the Miley Cyrus song, and it was a song that she had performed at the VMA's in America and it was a scandalous performance. So I thought it would be really interesting to take that song and... make it really work as a 1950s doo-wop song... Doo-wop is the complete antithesis of that kind of style. Squeaky clean, wholesome... The next day it was the most watched video in all of YouTube."

Then there was the time he outdid Justin Bieber: "I released a version of [Love Yourself] where I made it kind of visually aged in black and white, made it sound kinda older and I posted it on Facebook. And so many people were sharing it and thinking that this was the original version of that Justin Bieber song; that Justin Bieber had covered this song that was actually from the 1920s. So that gave me a bit of a thrill. I just left it, I thought it was so funny."

And lastly, when he injured his clarinettist while filming a videoclip: "We [had] our clarinettist jump out the window and pick up the sousaphone which was on a rosebush… I think we had to rehearse that about five different times and [he] was getting all scratched up from diving into the rose bush over and over again!"