''Kind of Bloop'' is an album produced by
Andy Baio
Andy Baio (born 1977) is an American technologist and blogger. He is the co-founder of the XOXO festival, founder of the Upcoming social calendar website, a former CTO of Kickstarter, and the author of the Waxy.org blog.
Career
In 2003, whil ...
, intended as a
chiptune
Chiptune, also called 8-bit music (although not all chiptune is 8-bit music), is a style of electronic music made using the programmable sound generator (PSG) sound chips or synthesizers in vintage arcade machines, computers and video gam ...
cover of
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music, 20th-century music. Davis ado ...
's album ''
Kind of Blue
''Kind of Blue'' is a studio album by American jazz musician Miles Davis, released on August17,1959, by Columbia Records. For this album, Davis led a sextet featuring saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, pianist Bill Ev ...
''.
Composition, release and reception
Kickstarter
Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative project ...
is a website that allows people to pool together money to fund others' projects. A few months after its launch in 2009, Baio, a Miles Davis fan and the site's then chief technical officer, came up with the idea of recreating ''Kind of Blue'' in chiptune, a type of music found in early video games, as an example project to test the site's functionality. After getting copyright permission for each of ''Kind of Blue'' five songs, Baio assigned each to a musician to work on for three months, allowing each complete creative control with the sole condition of keeping "Davis' original feeling and intensity". The track "All Blues" fell to New York jazz pianist Sam Ascher-Weiss, who created his version by relying on a recording of himself playing the original. According to him, the task was tiresome, requiring " a masochistic desire to have something difficult to do ".
The album was publicly released on August 20, three days after the 50th anniversary of ''Kind of Blue''s release. According to Baio, before its release, it was received negatively by users in some online jazz forums who "fe
tlike it
asblasphemy". Claire Suddah of ''Time'' described the album as not "sound
nglike jazz" but not "sound
ngcompletely unlike it either. It's like Miles Davis lost in ''
Legend of Zelda
is a media franchise, video game series created by the Japanese game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. It is primarily developed and published by Nintendo; some portable installments and re-releases have been outsourced to Flags ...
''".
Track listing
References
Further reading
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External links
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* {{Cite web , last=Baio , first=Andy , date=June 23, 2011 , title=Kind of Screwed , url=https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/ , access-date=May 21, 2025 , website=waxy.org
2009 albums
Kickstarter-funded albums
Chiptune albums