Postmodern 2017

Our first album of 2017 takes some of the biggest hits of the '80s, '90s, and 2000s through an eclectic mix of inspired vintage styles, captured at the historic PMJ Manor. Some of the featured artists included are Melinda Doolittle, Sara Niemietz, Robyn Adele Anderson, Blake Lewis, and Mayre Martinez - plus many others!

“New Gramophone, Who Dis?” isn’t just a handy excuse for “losing” someone’s number (especially when you’d rather stay home spinning your 78s – or listening to PMJ). It’s also the title of our 13th CD! Who dis, you ask? Well it’s an all-star cast but some of the highlights include American Idol alum Vonzell Solomon fronting a reggae version of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” and Ariana Savalas bringing her flirtatious flair to Shaggy’s anthem for cheaters, “It Wasn’t Me.” Kenton Chen gives Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” a fabulously funky makeover, and Grace Kelly doubles on vocals and sax for a jazzy remake of Fifth Harmony’s self-empowerment ode, “Worth It.”

How did Miley Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" become a '50s-style doo wop number? Since when was Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass" about an upright bass fiddle? At what point did Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" evolve into a '20s hot jazz tune? And whose idea was it to rework Lorde's "Royals" into a polished ballad sung by a sad clown? It's all part of the topsy-turvy world of Postmodern Jukebox, an ongoing musical project spearheaded by pianist and arranger Scott Bradlee, who takes contemporary pop and rock tunes and fashions new arrangements for them that cast them in an unpredictable variety of musical styles from the past. Born on Long Island, Bradlee relocated to New York City after studying jazz at the University of Hartford. While playing gigs at restaurants and nightclubs in New York City, Bradlee began experimenting with ragtime and jazz arrangements of pop tunes from the '80s, and he recorded several self-released digital albums of his offbeat versions of well-known melodies, as well as performances that interpolated seemingly dissimilar songs of different eras.

San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa draws inspiration from a wide range of sources in her music, from film to visual art to science. Her newest release, avantNOIR, is a suite of compositions for jazz sextet based on noir crime fiction—classic works by Dashiell Hammett set in San Francisco, and later works by Paul Auster that are part of his New York Trilogy. Mezzacappa probes the psychological depths of these stories, creating musical profiles of characters like Big Flora from Hammett’s The Big Knockover, and Daniel Quinn from Auster’s City of Glass. She also uses clues from detective’s cases—addresses, aliases, phone numbers, hotel rooms—and translates them into musical structures, melodies and rhythms, in a kind of postmodern jazz serialism. The result is a contemporary jazz gem influenced as much by Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez as by Eric Dolphy and Henry Threadgill.