The latest concert from the Juno Award-winning Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is a study in the limitations of vintage technology and the freedom of jazz.
The orchestra will team up with drummer and YouTuber Ben Kidd along with his ensemble 8-Bit & the Single Players to perform arrangements of classic video game music ranging from Super Mario Brothers to Pokémon in a concert called 8-Bit Big Band.
Putting ‘8-Bit Music Theory’ into practice
Kidd, who shares content about video game music on his highly popular channel 8-bit Music Theory, says that part of the challenge and the joy of music from its early days is the limitations in its software. “All these soundtracks were composed on sound hardware that was super limited,” he explains, adding that the original Nintendo Entertainment System could only produce three pitches at the same time because of the amount of memory available.
“The composers of the day had to rely on melodies, on making super-strong melodies because they just didn’t have that much else to work with,” Kidd says, “and so, this music is melodic and thematic and grabs you and the best of it is really, really phenomenal writing.”
For the 8-Bit Big Band concert, Kidd has taken those limited melodies and blown them up to accommodate the full complement of the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra. “It’s like, ‘Well, what else can we do now? How can we unleash this tune?’” Kidd smiles. “It’s been a very fun process working towards that.”
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Becoming the new standards
Despite the contrast in limitations, Kidd says that jazz music and vintage video game soundtracks blend quite well, going so far as to say that the music of vintage video games could be a genesis point for the next wave of jazz composition.
“You think about the history of jazz and early jazz music,” he says, “… and through till today, jazz musicians mostly play jazz standards which were written as show tunes in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Nowadays, jazz musicians still play that same group of tunes… but nobody my age knows them as pop tunes.“
“For me, video game music is set up to replace those standards or exist alongside those standards as the sort of modern music that people can latch onto,” he elaborates. “It gives people something to hold onto and say, ‘I know this theme!’, but it is instrumental music and it does provide a really kind of perfect vehicle for jazz exploration.”
8-Bit Big Band takes the stage at the West End Cultural Centre at 7:30 p.m. on April 16. Tickets and more details are available at the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra’s website.