Kind of Bloop: An 8 Bit Tribute to Miles Davis

Kind of Bloop was the brainchild of Andy Baio, a journalist, programmer, and 8-bit music enthusiast who wanted to commission a chiptune cover version of Kind of Blue to commemorate the ablum’s 50th anniversary. To fund his scheme, Baio turned to Kickstarter, a website that funds artistic projects through small, individual donations. (Baio is the CTO of Kickstarter.) The funds went to cover the royalty payments and pay the artists. The entire album is available for download at the bargain basement price of $5.

“Chiptune” is the term of art for 8-bit music. It refers to computer music that plays real time synthesized sounds from a program rather than prerecorded samples or sequences of samples. Some chiptune enthusiasts make the music from refurbished technology like old Game Boys. Others use emulators that approximate the original 8-bit sounds. Five chiptune artists contributed a tune a piece to the project, and Kind of Bloop follows its namesake’s song order precisely. Each cover was crafted with as much reverence as you can muster when you’re making video game music out of hallowed jazz standards.

Ast0r’s cover of “So What” preserves the cool reserve of the original tune. The tune proceeds at an unhurried pace, with bits of color exploding as bloopy splashes. Ast0r approximates the gentle virtuosity of Miles’s trumpet solo, alternately cutting notes short by piling other notes on top of them and dragging them out across increasingly wide time spans. His cover has the jazziest surface of any of the covers. And it should: Ast0r has covered John Coltrane and Charlie Parker in the past.

Virt’s “Freddie Freeloader” begins with the jilted inevitability of a classic MIDI composition. It sounds like something straight from an Amiga message board. But, like Miles’s original, the tune starts cooking midway through, and, about three minutes in, it sounds as if Virt grabbed the power-up that doubled his character’s speed. The tune mellows after that, returning to the earlier animatronic pace.

“Blue in Green” is a ballad, and Spanish chiptune artist Sergeeo brings a subterranean Zelda level sensibility to his arrangement. Like Ast0r, Sergeeo has tackled an 8-bit cover of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and knows something about restraint. “Blue and Green” might have been the hardest tune on the album to pull off, and, while few are going to want to swap Sergeeo’s version for the original, he managed to squeeze out a chiptune cover suffused with something like real feeling.

Shnabubula’s version of “All Blues” comes closer than any other track on the album to legitimate video game music. Whether the see-sawing of the melody would make the player ill before she finished the level is one thing, but even the solos seem like they were excerpted from an epic fight screen.

The album closes with Disasterpeace and his cover of “Flamenco Sketches.” Sounding more like prog rock than chiptune, Disasterpeace’s cover plumbs the distance between modal jazz and its inheritors like Pink Floyd and Peter Frampton.

If A Reggae Interpretation of Kind of Blue was one man’s means for validating one musical genre, Kind of Bloop serves as a reminder that the instrument you’re playing is no more important than the strength of the music and the expansiveness of your imagination.

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