Word: jazzing
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Miles Davis probably never played Nintendo. It's technically possible; the genre-bending, stereotype-defying jazz legend lived until 1991, six years after the first Nintendo Entertainment System was released in North America. Who knows how the trumpet player spent his free time? He may have seen a video game, or even picked up a controller. But it's a pretty safe bet that he never stormed Bowser's castle or paused to appreciate the "piku-piku-piku" sound that played when Mario went down a tunnel...
...fact, the jazz and video-game-music communities have remained largely separate until now. And yes, there is a video-game-music community - an extensive, primarily Internet-based collective of musicians who focus on a genre they call chiptune. Most enthusiasts are people in their 20s and 30s who find themselves drawn to the sounds of early video games, to blend those electronic bleeps and bloops with rock, pop and hip-hop. Chiptune is still relatively obscure: in 2007, hip-hop artist Timbaland got in trouble for sampling a tune composed by a Finnish chiptune musician...
...full artistic license; they could experiment or stay as true to the original song as they wanted. His only request was that the finished products retain some of Davis' original feeling and intensity. "Other than that, they were free to do whatever they felt," says Baio. "That's what jazz is about, right?" He named his experiment Kind of Bloop...
...reads it as if it were sheet music," explains 24-year-old Sam Ascher-Weiss, whose cover of Davis' "All Blues" appears on Kind of Bloop. "You see what it sounds like, mess around with it, and try it again." Ascher-Weiss is a chiptune anomaly: he is a jazz pianist and working musician in New York City. For Kind of Bloop, he recorded himself playing "All Blues" on the piano. Then he listened to the recording and figured out how to program it on the computer. The process was very laborious. "You're making music with outdated computers...
...surprisingly, jazz purists hate it. "I've gone on jazz message boards and they're offended by it. They feel like it's blasphemy," says Baio. He points out that since Kind of Bloop wasn't available to the public until Aug. 20, the haters were complaining about something they had never heard. (Baio timed the project's release with the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue, which took place on Aug. 17. The original Kickstarter backers were able to download the songs on the actual anniversary date, with the public release coming three days later...