Outside the Jukebox_How I Turned My Vintage Music Obsession Into My Dream Gig

by Scott Bradlee

  For my sixth birthday, my parents bought me my first vinyl record (keep in mind this was the preferred medium at the time; Sunday and Richard were not hipsters): Michael Jackson’s Bad. To say I was obsessed with this record is an understatement. I learned how to operate the turntable just so I could listen to “Smooth Criminal” on repeat, however many times I wanted, whenever I wanted. Michael Jackson provided the soundtrack for my own private performances of the moonwalk, which, at six years of age, entailed simply walking backward. I learned to read by poring over the lyrics insert, matching the words to what Michael was singing, which on one unforgettable occasion led to my poor mother having to define “seduce” for me in the most G-rated manner possible. For the rest of the year, that album and Paul Simon’s Graceland were on constant rotation in our house. In first grade, I insisted on singing “Man in the Mirror” in the school talent show. (I couldn’t pronounce my r’s back then, so it actually came out more like “Man in the Miwwow.”) I’m lucky to have the audio of that very first public performance preserved for posterity; my parents proudly captured it with their brand-new tape recorder.

  I had a lot of interests when I entered middle school, but music wasn’t necessarily at the top of the list. I loved baseball and enjoyed collecting baseball cards (although I was never brave enough to try the stale pieces of gum that—inexplicably to me—accompanied the packs of said cards). I enjoyed building things but even more so enjoyed taking things apart to try to discover how they worked. It was fairly typical of me to hound my parents for months to buy me an electronic game of some sort and then, within hours of receiving it, for me to render it inoperable by disassembling it and rearranging the microchips in a different order.

  My musical tastes at that point in time were largely dictated by my friend Steve Rekuc from down the road, who was a couple years older and infinitely cooler than me—which was at least partially owed to his house having a pool and cable TV. Under Steve’s tutelage, I developed an affinity for MTV and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and I made my first cassette purchase wisely: Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em by MC Hammer. We would listen to hits like “Can’t Touch This” while we shot hoops and played video games, and I took dressing in corresponding attire very seriously. From ages eight to eleven, I almost exclusively wore some combination of Ocean Pacific beachwear, baggy pants with loud designs (called “skids”), and a rotating selection of fluorescent hats. In the annual bus stop back-to-school picture, I was the kid taking fashion cues from Sinbad.

  I was nine when the era of my formal piano lessons began, though it didn’t take long for my parents to realize where piano fell on my list of priorities: extremely low. Piano lessons, as it turns out, typically aren’t the most exciting activity for a young kid from rural New Jersey who dresses like Sinbad and listens to C+C Music Factory. The summer before I entered fifth grade, my piano teacher conveniently went away on an extended vacation, and when she returned, before my mom even had a chance to inquire, was quick to notify us that she’d managed already to fill her entire schedule for the coming semester. And with that, my short-lived classical piano career came to a grinding halt. I was overjoyed.

  I’m of the opinion that the very first step in learning any discipline is finding a way to get yourself feeling profoundly inspired and invested. Learning to master a skill is a long, arduous process, involving many stagnant plateaus and discouraging disappointments. Unless you’re approaching your learning from a place of genuine inspiration, you’re probably going to have a hard time staying committed to the process, especially when the going gets tough. Motivation alone can sustain you—but only for so long; psyching yourself up to do something you don’t really want to do gets old, fast. For me, it was the stiff nature of the lessons that blocked my pathways to inspiration and turned practicing into a chore.

  It wasn’t my teacher’s fault that, at age eleven, I possessed neither the inspiration nor motivation to learn piano; I simply wasn’t enamored with classical music or the thought of being a pianist in general. My mom, used to dealing with all sorts of stubborn children as a teacher, accepted this in stride with her usual optimism.

  “I do think you’ll come to see how much enjoyment music can bring you. Maybe you’ll return to piano someday,” she offered hopefully.

  “Fat chance,” I scoffed, profoundly inspired at the time by the sardonic wit of my beloved Calvin and Hobbes comic books.

  Despite being a quitter when it came to piano, I was a pretty observant and studious child and definitely very curious about the world—a trait that my mom, in particular, encouraged. In school, I placed great emphasis on learning as much as I could, to the point where I spent first-grade math class quietly working out of a folder of more advanced work in the back corner of the room… by choice. My hope of being the smartest kid in the world was all but shattered a month later, when I glanced up from yet another set of boring division problems and saw, across the room, the rest of the class being plied with M&M’s into performing basic addition and subtraction problems, ostensibly to conflate the dubious joys of math with the verifiable joys of sugar consumption. And so it was that, at the ripe old age of seven, I became enlightened to the fact that this world we live in is not just and that organized education breeds disillusionment for some. My piano teacher never stood a chance. If I was to learn the instrument, it would have to be on my own terms.

  I first heard the piece of music that would change my life when a next-door neighbor—a more advanced and much more diligent piano student than I was—began studying George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Exciting, humorous, brash, and alive and adult, it sounded nothing like any piano piece I’d heard before—nothing like the stuffy sonatinas that I had been assigned (nothing against sonatinas, of course), and it got under my skin. It got me wondering whether maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t given piano enough of a shot.

  It had been a year since my last piano lesson, and when I wasn’t busy collecting cassettes of music that spoke to me—the rap duo Kris Kross was now the artist du jour—I began dabbling in attempts to pick up where I’d left off with piano—on my own. Coming into adolescence, I decided to abandon my previously held career aspirations—astronaut, professional baseball player, and cartoonist—and rebrand myself as a talented pianist, setting out to teach myself pieces that would impress and captivate my hypothetical audience. These pieces, as you likely could have guessed, tended to be far beyond my skill level: “Puck” by Grieg, Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody #2,” and Chopin’s “Polonaise in A Major.” Although I lacked the technique to play them well, I was able to sort of stumble through the sheet music through brute force, and gradually, my skill level increased. More importantly, though, I was enjoying the challenge, often spending three or four hours in a single day tackling difficult passages.

  Through it all, Rhapsody in Blue was in the back of my mind—as my end goal, as my reward for all this training. And not the abridged version that my neighbor played; I wanted to play the real-deal version that Leonard Bernstein recorded. I spent weeks calling every music store in a fifty-mile radius, attempting to track down that original, unabridged version. In that pre-Internet era, I often asked the disinterested store clerks to thumb through the pages and describe to me over the phone the way the notes looked on the page. Finally, I hit upon success, and my dad drove all the way to Princeton to retrieve the piece of music that I had long dreamed of playing. He had the sheet music waiting for me in a tan sleeve when I got home from school that glorious afternoon. Holding my breath, I nervously turned past the blue cover to see if it was, indeed, the complete version. The opening page was full of elegant glissandos and complex notation; this was it. I thanked my dad for heroically going well out of his way to make this possible and then wasted no time in tearing into the music on our old spinet piano with the sticking keys. I remember, in the moment, thinking to myself that it was a day I’d never forget. That’s proved true, but it ended up being more than unforgettable: It would go down in my person
al history as a life-changing day, as well.

  Rhapsody in Blue was hard. Really hard. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the sheet music I had in my possession was actually the piano reduction, meaning that it wasn’t solely the piano part of the orchestral score that I heard Leonard Bernstein play but the entire score for all instruments, just kind of mashed together into two staves. Some passages seemed to require a third hand. Undaunted, I tore into the score in the same way that I read books: I skipped right on ahead to the interesting parts first.

  At the time, the “interesting” parts, to me, were the jazz-influenced bits: the piano runs and chromatic passages; the iconic, blue note–heavy theme; the slow, bluesy riff that led to the memorable United Airlines commercial jingle (sorry, Gershwin). I would pick apart these exotic, intriguing passages, trying to unearth their inner workings the same way I had taken apart my toys a few years earlier. A whole new world opened up for me when, in an attempt to find other pieces with the sounds I so loved, I started looking into Gershwin’s non-classical influences. I decided that I needed to explore this thing called ragtime piano, and I hungrily read about its history and practitioners as I worked my way through a book of Scott Joplin piano rags. Inspiration, it seemed, was taking me to new places that the structured tutorials of an expert never had.

  My journey took me far and wide and nearly a century back in time. I learned about stride piano—a kind of fancier version of ragtime—and listened in awe as Fats Waller played “A Handful of Keys.” I couldn’t find any sheet music for this one, but thanks to the Joplin book, I had a pretty solid training on the oom-pah left-hand and standard ragtime chords, and I managed to pick out a good chunk of it by ear. I learned about how diminished chords were used in jazz and how to roll octaves to create a tremolo effect. I devoured books about the birth of jazz in New Orleans and its key figures: Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke. I took out CDs and cassettes by the dozen from my local library and would sit at the piano with headphones on, rewinding passages again and again and trying to mimic them. My repertoire grew: “Carolina Shout” by James P. Johnson, “Black and Tan Fantasy” by Duke Ellington, “The Pearls” by Jelly Roll Morton. The hours flew by; there weren’t enough in the day to sate my need to play and learn and explore. Suddenly, the instrument my parents couldn’t have bribed me to go near in the not-so-distant past had become my most favorite companion and the source of much joy.

  The piano, for me, was a portal to another universe: a place of dimly lit nightclubs with dancing flappers, lively second-line New Orleans parades, and larger-than-life music legends competing with one another for glory. I imagined performing with my own jazz band at raucous parties and meeting all the colorful characters congregated therein. When I played, I felt a connection with all the legendary performers who created this music; even in 1995, a James P. Johnson lick still sounded exactly as it would have sounded at the moment of conception. It was as though I had found a way to slip through the fabric of time and place myself smack-dab into a bygone era. Playing jazz helped me find a place where I belonged—even if it mostly existed in my mind. For a skinny kid in New Jersey, with braces, a greasy bowl cut, and questionable taste in fashion, this other universe offered a welcome escape from the growing pains of the real world, and in the hours I wasn’t there, it was the only place I dreamt of being.

  FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE PROCESS

  To the amazement of my parents—and to my own amazement—practicing the piano was no longer something I fought against tooth and nail. Instead, knowing that I wanted to be a piano player, and knowing that practicing, of course, was just something piano players did, I turned my daily practice into a habit. Now, habits get a bad rap; we tend to think of things like biting our nails or smoking when we talk about them. But really, a habit is defined as “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.” Tooth brushing is a habit (for most of us). So is showing up to work on time. Those are some good habits. Habits can be good; say it with me.

  Once you’ve trained your brain to view practicing as a habit, the next step is finding the motivation to adopt that habit. The key to motivation, I’ve learned, is coupling your profound inspiration to a strong belief in yourself, and that’s not something even the best teacher is able to instill. It has to come from within. Building a strong core identity to drive your motivation requires first believing that you’ll eventually master the skill you’ve set out to learn—no matter how farfetched that might initially seem to yourself and others. Having the correct image of yourself is really key here; you have to think of yourself as the thing you want to be long before other people think of you as that. You may only have taken one trumpet lesson and sound horrible, but you still must think of yourself as a trumpet player in order for the habit to stick. You are whatever you do repeatedly.

  Practicing became such a constant in my day—and in such a natural, unforced way—that I hardly had to think about it. It had become, in other words, a habit. Progress came very quickly, and the bulk of my piano skill was developed between the ages of twelve and fourteen; after that, it was for the most part a matter of refining the rough edges of my homegrown technique and learning the theory behind the pieces I played. I lived and breathed jazz piano in those years, to the exclusion of everything else. School was still a drag for me, and I’d begun to channel the profound inspiration I drew from Calvin and Hobbes into pulling pranks on my teachers to create disruptions in class. These pranks ranged from drawing caricatures of my teachers in a variety of embarrassing contexts and completing my math homework in the style and format of a Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes letter, to attending seventh-grade classes for a week straight, which wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that I was in eighth grade. My mom, always quick to defend her beloved progeny, was of little use to the teachers who called our house to complain.

  “Oh, he’s so creative, isn’t he?” she would beam, blissfully ignorant of my less-than-angelic behavior at school and stubbornly resistant to being enlightened about it.

  My antics garnered me a lot of attention and occasionally praise from classmates, but in actuality, I was something of a loner in junior high. I had only a few friends, and they tended to be the other troublemakers I occasionally enlisted in my campaigns of mischief. I was largely all right with this, preferring to race home right after school to practice piano anyway, rather than hang around and try to fit in.

  By the time high school started, others had finally begun to see me as I saw myself: as a talented pianist, a “music kid.” I made friends with a group of misfits and musicians who shared my distaste for the rigidity of school and our homogenous, boring small town, as idyllic as it was. They were outsiders and proud of it; they smoked weed, caused trouble, and were generally disliked by the more popular kids in school. I was definitely the straight edge in the bunch, but as a quiet teenager with very few friends, I was grateful to find a group that accepted me. One of our crew, Cody (of Walmart story fame), lived near the high school; we’d often all cut class to jam on instruments at his house. I showed my new friends the style of jazz that I was into, and although it wasn’t really their speed, they appreciated my talent and always talked me up to the people we encountered. Or at least, they tried to:

  CUTE GIRL AT A PARTY: Hi.

  ME: Hi, I’m Scott. So, um… cool party, huh?

  FRIEND: Scott’s a huge pianist.

  CUTE GIRL: Excuse me?

  ME: (frantically pantomiming playing the piano, trying to rescue the situation) He means “piano player”; I’m a piano player.

  FRIEND: Yeah, a really big one. Like a really big pianist. You should date him!

  CUTE GIRL:… I’m just going to leave now. Nice meeting you two.

  I may not have been confident socializing with the opposite sex, but I was becoming very confident in my skills as a musician. There’s an inherent contradiction embedded in practice—at least that I’ve found in my experie
nce: While motivation to put in the hours comes from being confident in your ability to eventually master and contribute to a craft, arriving at that confidence to begin with often requires putting in many, many hours of practice. This catch-22 is the reason so many people pick up the guitar only to quit after learning a couple Jimmy Buffett songs—it’s difficult to imagine yourself as anything but a beginner when you are starting out.

  After several years of consistent practice, I was beginning to discover what I could contribute to the lexicon of jazz. Thanks to my friends and their tastes, I developed an appreciation for non-jazz styles of music, too. Initially, this meant gangsta rap by hip-hop artists like Notorious B.I.G., 2Pac, and Dr. Dre—all artists who frequently sampled jazz and soul licks in their instrumentals. I enjoyed picking out those references to older songs and styles and seeing how artists paid homage to music’s colorful history. At home, I began to play hip-hop mixtapes over my speakers while improvising on the piano at the same time; suddenly, the repetitive instrumentals became modal jazz, the laid-back, cool style of jazz pioneered by Miles Davis on his bestselling album Kind of Blue. The possibilities of somehow updating my musical vocabulary by filtering it through more current or popular genres of music fascinated me.

  One day, while hanging out with some friends at my house, I made the bold claim that I could turn any song into a jazz song.

  “Name any rap song,” I boasted, “and I’ll make it into jazz.”

  “Any song? You mean, any song with a piano part, right?”

  “No, I mean any song,” I corrected. “Trust me, I can do it.”

  “Okay, how about some Biggie? Play ‘Big Poppa.’”

  Easy; the Notorious B.I.G. track sampled an already jazzy Isley Brothers song, “Between the Sheets.” I played it as jazz by swinging the synth line, giving it a Count Basie feel. After finishing, I further demonstrated my ability by playing it with a stride left hard, giving it a turn-of-the-century ragtime feel. Now I was just showing off, but I couldn’t help it. This was exciting for me, too. It took my friends a beat to wrap their heads around the transformed tune, but once they had done so, they were roaring with delight.