Outside the Jukebox

by Scott Bradlee

  “That’s crazy!! I could actually hear the song in there. Do another one—what about some Weezer?”

  I obliged, spending the next hour turning contemporary hits by groups like Sublime and Red Hot Chili Peppers into jazz and ragtime songs. It was fun watching my friends’ faces as they recognized each one. But most satisfying of all for me was that they were enjoying the vintage sounds, despite having always professed not to enjoy jazz. This was progress.

  Just as I was helping my friends appreciate music from a half-century before, so, too, were they helping me develop a genuine interest in the songs released in the past few years. It was a win–win situation. One song that I particularly connected with was Radiohead’s first and biggest hit, the grunge-inspired anthem “Creep.” It spoke to me, its chorus pretty much summing up my high school experience with effortless ease:

  But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  I don’t belong here.…

  “Creep” reminded me of being a freshman and going to a school dance for the first time. I was painfully shy and completely out of my element, a scrawny kid in a setting populated by older, self-assured jocks and cheerleaders breezily joking around and flirting with one another. When I arrived, I spent a good thirty minutes scanning the room, looking for someone—anyone—that I recognized, before giving up. Defeated, I traipsed outside and sat on the curb until my dad came to get me a couple hours later. It’s not exactly a memory I like recalling, but I loved the chords in that song. They sounded a bit like the old jazz standard “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and every once in a while, I would find myself noodling around on the piano, improvising over them.

  My musical ability developed in tandem with my expanding love for the breadth of musical genres, and my focus became understanding each genre’s discrete elements, breaking them down and reassembling them, putting them in contact in ways I’d never heard before. Instead of doing my homework in high school, I continued exploring the link between hip-hop and jazz, eventually discovering jazz-influenced groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. From there I fell further down the rabbit hole, arriving at the source of so many of their instrumental samples: ’70s funk like Parliament-Funkadelic, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and Ohio Players. This was party music, no doubt about it, but at its core it still possessed the organic essence of improvised music that attracted me to jazz.

  As a pianist, jazz was my first love—that would never change—but bit by bit I was learning that there were jazz roots in everything I was listening to and that playing one genre didn’t mean that I couldn’t play other genres, too. It was an exciting realization for me, a realization in no small part indebted to my “party trick” of turning pop songs into jazz. Like most other people, I’d taken genres for granted as something akin to rigid boxes with established rules, but really, I was discovering, they are more like streams, meandering and converging as they wind their way to a river; the water flows freely, and it is impossible to say for sure where a new stream begins and an old one continues with the added force of a tributary. I decided that calling myself a “jazz pianist” was too limiting. I would be a “jazz pianist who also performed funk and hip-hop.” It was a specific niche I’d carved out for myself but one that I soon found a home for, on the Internet.

  CREATING THE FUTURE BY EMBRACING THE PAST

  Even as I was enamored, primarily, with musical history, I enjoyed experimenting with new sounds, too. At my occasional live performance—I had been repurposed as a pianist at a deli after the manager discovered my short-order cooking skills to be seriously lacking—I was getting a better response to my era-collapsing mashups than anything I’d played before. By embracing the sounds that were most familiar to people, I was able to connect with them and get them to trust me as their guide through the uncharted territory of “vintage music.”

  Through it all, though, jazz remained my calling. On my bedroom wall I hung a reproduction of Art Kane’s legendary 1958 photograph “A Great Day in Harlem,” given to me by my aunt and uncle. The photograph, which showed fifty-seven famous jazz musicians gathered in front of a brownstone in Harlem, endlessly fascinated me. Each night before I went to sleep I studied it, noticing different details. There’s Count Basie, sitting on the curb because he’d grown tired of standing. Above him is Thelonious Monk, wearing shades and a light-colored jacket, perhaps to be more conspicuous. Off near the fringes, clad in his trademark porkpie hat and with his body facing slightly away from the camera, was Lester Young. I imagined the stories behind the assembly of such an awesome collection of talent in one place. All fifty-seven of them had dedicated their lives to contributing to jazz, America’s first truly original art form. It was awe-inspiring to imagine the dedication they possessed.

  Occasional trips into New York City soon became a reliable source of inspiration for me as a teenager. My outsider friends and I were bored of being confined to the parameters of our small, conventional town and dreamed of the day that we would experience freedom from the monotony and oppression of high school. Taking the train into Penn Station on a Saturday offered us a glimmer of that someday freedom. We made the most of every second there—sifting through vinyl at record stores, watching drum circles and chess matches at Union Square, and sneaking into bars to hear live music. By the time we caught the last train on the Raritan Valley line home, we’d be feeling physically exhausted but mentally energized. Even to this day, no experience surpasses the excitement and optimism I feel stepping outside the station and seeing the lights of New York City dance in the night, the wind whipping around the Midtown high-rises.

  Back home, I finished out my high school career with a flourish, graduating in the bottom half of my class of three hundred. My parents, unsurprisingly, were horrified; even my perennially positive mother couldn’t manage to find a positive spin for this achievement.

  “I’m not angry with you; I’m disappointed in you,” she intoned sternly, placing my report card before me on the dining room table, where I sat with downcast eyes.

  This just feels awful, I remember thinking. I would’ve preferred her to be angry.

  As much as I hated school, as much as I struggled through my classes until eventually succumbing to the tides of mediocrity and no longer trying, I wanted my parents to be proud of me. They were both first-generation college graduates, and they’d worked so hard to give me and my sister every advantage throughout our childhoods. I felt ashamed and wished I could somehow go back in time and redo my schooling with greater effort and focus; I would have done so in a heartbeat, knowing how much it meant to my parents. But hindsight is 20/20, and sitting there then, met with my mother’s sadness, I found myself silently vowing to give my all—from that moment on—to realizing my musical dreams and achieving success as a musician, no matter how tough it got. My grades may have fallen short of my parents’ expectations for me, but I knew I could still do them proud with other accomplishments in life.

  AN UNDERACHIEVER’S GUIDE TO FUMBLING THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION

  Graduating high school in the bottom half of my class wasn’t exactly the strongest indicator that I would meet with any more success in college. My abysmal showing in both the humanities and sciences did, however, all but cement the idea that, if my educational journey were to continue, it was going to involve a pursuit of the arts. To get accepted to any decent college, you see, I would have to apply with a declared major in music. Obviously, this sounded far from the worst fate to me, and the range of schools it opened up for consideration—from conservatories like the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and Berklee College of Music in Boston, to general universities like Rowan University and SUNY Purchase, which also had jazz programs—was enticing and wide. Ultimately, I wound up selecting The Hartt School at University of Hartford, which seemed to be the best of both worlds: a conservatory within a university. On top of my excitement about its program offerings, it also was the school that offere
d me the most substantial scholarship, which helped make up for its tuition being a bit higher than what my family could afford.

  A WARNING TO MY FELLOW MUSIC KIDS

  I want to take a second here to talk about my decision to go to school for music, since I get asked for advice on this pretty often. If you’re a young musician (or dancer, or musical theatre actor, or any type of creative performer for that matter) and you’ve progressed in your abilities to the point that a career in the arts seems like a viable path forward, it’s only logical that you’ll find yourself considering a formal continuation of your music studies post–high school. Whether you go the route of the conservatory or enroll in a music program within a more traditional college, you’ll receive training from professional musicians, perform in ensembles alongside other talented students, and have access to state-of-the-art facilities and concert halls. The icing on the cake? You’ll get to sleep in late on weekdays, take classes that appeal to you, and surround yourself with artsy, inspiring kids who share your interests and passions. If all that sounds like a dream, it’s because, in many ways, it is. But any dream has its potential downsides, and I think that it’s important that you’re aware of them, too.

  It’s no secret that colleges in the United States—in particular, the private schools that host many of the top music programs—are expensive. Seriously expensive. Colleges are big businesses, and, like any other business, they’re driven by profit goals. While some of your professors will be genuinely caring, helpful, and enthusiastic about imparting knowledge, others will, undoubtedly, be motivated to teach, in large part, by their desire to collect a steady paycheck.

  You may also find that the real-world career counseling available to you in music school is severely lacking, especially compared to the counseling at other majors’ disposal, since the usual rules of job placement just don’t apply to musicians. Now, I’m not saying that spending forty thousand dollars a year to study in a conservatory is a waste of money, necessarily—only that you should keep in mind that no school or degree can guarantee that a career in your chosen field awaits you on the other side. Do your research—and that includes talking to current students and alumni—before enrolling in any program.

  This is extra crucial if you’re planning to take out significant student loans to pay for said schooling. As we will see, I can tell you firsthand that financial decisions have a way of following you around for years.

  To me, the true value of college is not in what you learn but in how you go about learning. Essential, for instance, is keeping yourself open to experiencing unexpected insights, even if they conflict with previously held views. That mind-set will serve you well in school, though really, it’s a mind-set worth striving for throughout all of life. At the end of first semester, I wound up surprising my parents with straight A’s, which they joyously celebrated as a sign that I’d finally gotten my act together. I hadn’t, exactly, but I was learning—just not in the conventional sense. Yes, I still cut class on occasion; yes, I still neglected to do a fair number of my assignments; and yes, I still often went out partying instead of studying. These behaviors were somewhat expected of jazz studies majors, though, and most of our teachers made it clear from the get-go that they didn’t believe in grades anyway.

  What’s most important, though, is that I entered Hartt with a hunger to unleash and hone my talent as a musician, and I was prepared to do that by making the most of every possible resource available to me, both in and outside the classroom. From day one I treated the campus as my laboratory, hosting jam sessions, putting together ambitious musical productions, and inviting musicians to lay down tracks in my dorm room-turned-recording studio. And of course, I still was preoccupied with pushing boundaries and egging on my friends to do ridiculous things—stealing signs, setting off fireworks, and throwing raucous parties that eventually got us evicted from campus housing in the first of many evictions I’d live to tell of. But gradually, I was realizing that boundary-pushing could be just as satisfying when it leads to creative innovation and personal growth as when it results in minor destruction.

  In an unexpected twist, going to school specifically for jazz had, to a degree, cured me of my desire to focus solely on jazz. The fact that thirty or so other students in my year were studying exactly the same recordings rubbed me the wrong way, and I started looking for ways to stand out. I purposefully immersed myself in artists and genres I’d not explored much before, spending hours listening to their works and mapping out the characteristics. Certain works stuck out as particularly inspiring: Abbey Road by the Beatles for its form; La Bohème by Puccini for its beautiful melodies; and nearly the entirety of Elvis Costello’s discography for its lyrical richness. Jazz, Motown, and soul remained my passions, but I was learning to appreciate non-jazz music a whole lot more alongside them.

  As for modern-day pop, well, I couldn’t say the same. I didn’t dedicate my energies to disliking Top 40 radio so much as I tried to remain blissfully ignorant of it, with the exception of retro-themed hits like “Hey Ya!” by OutKast. Pop music, with its unsophisticated chord structures and inane lyrics, carried, for me, the connotation of lame fraternity parties and Hartford’s generic, college-themed bars, and I wanted no part in either.

  FINDING MY NICHE

  By the end of the first year of college, I’d matured leaps and bounds, taking my schooling and myself ever more seriously… though that’s not to say I didn’t have a ways to go. My rebellious streak still stubbornly prevented me from believing I could enjoy playing in someone else’s group. Sure, I enjoyed the performance opportunities that college afforded me, be they jazz ensemble classes or the occasional fill-in keyboard gig at a local bar (getting into a bar while underage was still very, very exciting to me), but I harbored serious dreams of leading a band.

  In my sophomore year, I decided to try my hand at leading a four-piece group for the first time since my fateful farewell concert at Walmart. I had a good friend named Sesha Loop, and I thought her name would make for a cool band name. So, that’s what I named the band: The Sesha Loop. Sesha didn’t seem particularly bothered by this appropriation of her identity, but I’m not sure she realized just how seriously or far I was planning to take the whole endeavor. After snapping a cliché “indie rock” photo of the four of us wearing leather jackets in my messy dorm room, we were officially a band. Time to take the world by storm.

  The Sesha Loop was my first attempt at a lot of things—songwriting, singing, booking gigs. As with any other new path being forged, there were bumps along the way. For starters, I didn’t know how to sing, so I settled on (mostly poorly) shouting the esoteric, Britpop-inspired lyrics I’d written for the group while also playing piano and synth simultaneously. And then there was the matter of drums. Our drummer didn’t have a real drum kit on campus, so he played instead on an electronic kit that lent the music an unintentional ’80s vibe.

  Thanks to some reckless credit card spending, I had acquired enough recording gear for us to make a four-song demo, which I poured my heart and soul into. I burned it onto CDs and sent it off to local music venues—along with our badass band photo, of course. That brazen self-promotion paid off in the form of our first gig at a pool hall in Middletown, Connecticut. To say that I spent hours mentally preparing for this triumphant debut would be an understatement.

  While it may not come as a surprise to you, I was shocked to learn that no one at the pool hall that Tuesday night was there to hear the music. Call me overly optimistic, but this truth became evident to me only after we’d entered the venue and begun setting up our gear. The clientele was older than us—way older—and very much focused on sinking shots and drinking. We met the “sound guy,” a very drunk man who accidentally burned my hand with his cigarette as he attempted to set up the mic. Small setbacks be damned, we persevered and tentatively started to play. Was I, in that moment, hoping that the room, upon hearing the siren sound of our music, would collectively abandon its pool cues and fall under a spel
l? Indeed, I was.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” I announced dramatically, “you are about to witness the very first performance of The Sesha Loop.” I waited a few beats to allow for the applause.

  It never came.

  “They must not have heard me. Play a big drumroll,” I whisper-hissed to our drummer. An odd static-y ’80s-sounding rumble emerged from the electronic set. I stared ahead blankly. Not being a drummer myself, I hadn’t known that doing a roll on a cheap electronic set leaves something to be desired.

  Well this is off to a great start, I thought.

  The first song ended to no applause. In fact, there was no acknowledgment whatsoever from the room that there was even a band onstage. We burned through our forty-five minutes of material without so much as a blink from the crowd. At one point during the set, I started to take my pants off to see if I could get any kind of reaction from the preoccupied patrons we thought of as our “audience.” Nope. Eleven rolled around, and the sound guy—who by now was exhibiting significant difficulty standing upright—paid us forty dollars for our efforts: a generous sum, considering the debatable entertainment value we’d provided.

  All in all, it was a terrible gig, but I had an absolute blast. If this earned us forty dollars, imagine what we could make if we landed a gig where people actually came to listen!

  Undeterred, perhaps even strangely encouraged, I kept booking shows for The Sesha Loop. We played venues as diverse as coffeehouses and skate parks. We started getting people to show up, listen, and—when they had been drinking heavily enough—even dance. I learned a little about live sound and mixing, and I became pretty skilled at talking to venue managers in a way that made it almost seem like I knew what I was talking about (“we need more 60 Hz in the bass!”).