[Editors Note: Seems like they have already reached their goal, but have said else where that anyone donating will get a copy of the cd.. so consider this a preorder?]
Excerpt from the man behind the project, Andy Baio: “What would the pioneers of jazz sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga? For years, I’ve wondered what “chiptune jazz” would sound like, but there are only a tiny handful of jazz covers ever made.
To satisfy my curiosity – and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” – I’ve asked five brilliant chiptune musicians to collaborate and reinvent
the entire album in the 8-bit sound.
The lineup, in alphabetical order:
Ast0r (formerly known as Beek) (Chris J. Hampton)
Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland)
Sergeeo (Sergio de Prado)
Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss)
Virt (Jake Kaufman)
To create this album, I hope to raise $2,000 to pay royalties, pay the artists, and print CDs. Legally releasing cover songs requires paying mechanical licenses to the song publishers through the Harry Fox Agency, totaling about $420 for every 250 downloads and a $75 processing fee. I’ll be using the remainder to print a very limited run of CDs for Kickstarter backers, and split the rest evenly among the five musicians for their painstaking work. (This is a labor of love for me, so I won’t be keeping a dime.)
I hope to have the entire album download ready for Kind of Blue’s 50th birthday on August 17. (Printing and shipping CDs will take longer.)
All project backers will get exclusive first access to the album download before anyone else in the world, and exclusive updates during the album’s creation. Backers donating $30 or more will receive an extremely limited-edition CD, printed only for this Kickstarter project. Once the August 1 deadline is reached, the CD will never be sold again!”
Track Listing (Tentative):
1. So What – Ast0r
2. Freddie Freeloader – Virt
3. Blue in Green – Sergeeo
4. All Blues – Shnabubula
5. Flamenco Sketches – Disasterpeace
This is an interesting solution to the problem of coming up with production costs. It certainly looks to be a great release on paper – and great that they raised the funds. I wonder how many places he had to post for help to pull in such a great result?
I saw it on offworld, and Gm4all, so it went viral, but they posted it here themselves via the new BETA TCTDBot, so credit has to go to them.
Sadly keep in mind this is just pledges.. i don’t think they have collected the money yet?
Hopefully when its over, they’ll share a post mortem of how they found the whole experience.
Major props have to go to the project planner, Andy Baio, he runs a prominent blog waxy.org that gets a ton of traffic, so I’m guessing a lot of the backing came from there!
What the hell, with ast0r and virt in the combo, this has to be really damned fucking good!!