How to get Gen Z into old-school tunes – with a little help from Taylor Swift

Telegraph

18-04-2025

This spring, at dozens of venues around the world – from Sydney Opera House to the Albert Hall – you'll find a 12-piece band playing music in the style of the 1920s and 1930s to huge audiences of people in their 20s and 30s, many of them dressed for the occasion in period costume. The band are Postmodern Jukebox, who specialise in performing 21st century pop hits in a pre-war jazz style. In their hands, Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes is turned into a New Orleans funeral dirge, Justin Bieber's Love Yourself is sung in the style of Jelly Roll Morton, while Dua Lipa 's Levitating is turned into a 1920s Charleston.
The project is the brainchild of New Jersey-born pianist Scott Bradlee. He studied jazz at music college 20 years ago but, where most of his peers specialised in more modern varieties of jazz – fusion, funk, Afrobeat, hard bop – Bradlee was attracted to earlier styles. 'I obsessively copied piano players like Jelly Roll Morton, James P Johnson, Fats Waller and Art Tatum,' he says. 'My party trick was to play Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd or something by Notorious BIG as a piece of ragtime piano – not something that any jazz venues were interested in at the time.'
In 2009, after moving to New York and struggling to get gigs, Bradlee uploaded a self-filmed video to YouTube, an eight-minute medley of 1980s hits by the likes of Dexys Midnight Runners, Madonna and Rick Astley, performed in a ragtime style. 'Within a few hours it had been viewed 10,000 times,' he says. 'Before long, hundreds were engaging in the comments: 'Do some ragtime versions of heavy metal songs!' 'How about a Katy Perry medley for stride piano?' I quickly realised that there was a market for this.'
Bradlee assembled a series of ad hoc bands with a few old music-school friends and jobbing singers around New York, christened the project Postmodern Jukebox, and started regularly filming and uploading his cleverly arranged jazz covers of contemporary pop songs by the likes of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. In 2013, his 1920s-style, Benny Goodman-inspired swing version of the biggest hit of the previous year, Thrift Shop by the rapper Macklemore, went viral – by the end of the year it had been watched four million times. Postmodern Jukebox's cover versions – filmed with ever more lavish conceptual staging and costumes – have since racked up nearly 2 billion views.
Postmodern Jukebox harks back to a time when jazz was the dominant popular dance music; when its musicians played the showtunes and Tin Pan Alley songs that were the hits of the day, something that largely stopped with the rise of rock 'n' roll. Since then, the jazz world has embraced a few pop songwriters – The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder and, more recently, Radiohead – but has largely avoided contemporary pop and rock songs.
'A lot of pop lacks the kind of chord changes that jazz musicians are comfortable with,' acknowledges Bradlee. 'Some recent songs don't have any chord changes at all! You have to work with a synth hook or a weird bassline and turn that into a chord sequence. You often have to insert extra passing chords to spice things up, and improvise to create more interesting melodies. But these are things that jazz musicians always do when performing covers.'
Juxtaposing contemporary pop with older forms is often done for laughs, as with Paul Anka's 2005 big-band album of indie songs, Rock Swings, or the Christian crooner Pat Boone's 1997 LP of thrash metal songs, No More Mr Nice Guy. 'There's a comic side, but it's crucial to have respect for the songs you cover,' says Bradlee. 'It's joyful, but I'm never sneering.'
Postmodern Jukebox, which Bradlee relocated to Nashville in 2017, can now enlist American Idol winners, Broadway stars and veteran Motown backing singers. Their current world tour sees them playing with half a dozen guest vocalists. 'We try to create a vintage universe,' says Bradlee, 'the kind of variety show with an MC that you might have experienced at the Harlem Apollo back in the day. We even get kids dressing up for shows, in 1920s gear! Young fans tell me that we've served as a gateway for jazz, which is great. But we also get older jazz fans exploring recent pop songs they might otherwise have ignored.'
Postmodern Jukebox start their European tour in Belfast on April 19, including a date at the Royal Albert Hall on April 23.
Scott Bradlee on how the Postmodern Jukebox transformed your favourite hits
Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N Roses
'This was one of the first songs that Postmodern Jukebox covered. Once you strip out the distorted guitar, you've basically got an ancient blues song – even the affectation of Axl Rose spelling 'of' as 'o' taps into the old Celtic lineage of the blues! I knew it would make a great Bessie Smith-style blues track, so we got Miche Braden, a legendary Motown veteran, to do a killer version. The chords are the same, all we've done is add a horn arrangement and put it in a swing rhythm.'
Old Town Road by Lil Nas X
'The biggest hit of 2019 was this fusion of southern hip hop and country music. This already has a strong blues hook, so it wasn't too much of a stretch to transform it into a piece of New Orleans-style traditional jazz – we just had to add a few extra chord changes to make it more harmonically interesting. The template here was Louis Armstrong's West End Blues: we used the same sousaphone bass and wailing clarinet, with Miche Braden hollering the vocals.'
Fancy by Iggy Azalea and Charlie XCX
'The lyrics of this 2014 hit are very much a celebration of hedonistic vanity, which chimed with the sharply dressed gangsters and flappers of the Jazz Age – hence my arrangement in the style of the great bandleader Fletcher Henderson, with singer Ashley Stroud doing a bit of tap dancing. There are no chord changes on the original – it's pretty much just one chord all the way through, so this is an instance where I've had to turn a four-note bassline into a four-chord sequence.'
Say You'll Be There by the Spice Girls
'The obvious connection was to recreate the biggest girl-group of the 1990s as the biggest girl-group of the 1940s, so we turned the Spice Girls into the Andrews Sisters. This is already quite a sophisticated song, with a clever chord sequence. We've got three incredible singers – Kyndle Wylde, Tawanda and Tatum Langley – singing really tight harmonies, the kind that Vic Schoen wrote for the Andrews Sisters, with Tatum vocalising a trumpet solo.'
Good Luck Babe by Chappell Roan
'As well as vintage jazz, we do a few tracks in postwar pop genres – Motown, doo-wop, bossa nova, and so on. This is one of the biggest hits of last year, and one which has already got great chord changes that you can sink your teeth into. I thought the sassy, screw-you, heartbroken vibe suited a Lesley Gore treatment, so the arrangement draws from Quincy Jones's production on It's My Party, with singer Tatum Langley doing a terrific performance.'