Kind of Bloop

Composition and funding

The website Kickstarter is designed to help people crowdsource the funding for their projects. Some months after its initial release in 2009, Baio, a Miles Davis fan and one of the site's board members,^{[‡ 1]} 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.^[1]

After purchasing a copyright license for each of Kind of Blue's five songs, Baio assigned each to a musician to work on for three months, allowing each musician complete creative control with the sole condition of keeping "Davis' original feeling and intensity". The track "All Blues" was assigned to New York–based jazz pianist Samuel Ascher-Weiss, who told Time journalist Claire Suddath that the task of making a cover—which involved relying on a recording of himself playing the original song—required "a masochistic desire to have something difficult to do".^[1]

Release history

The album was publicly released on August 20, 50 years and three days after the official release date of Kind of Blue.^[1] A 15th anniversary edition was released in August 2024.^[2]

Reception

One area of focus among reviewers and the public was the album's nature as a fusion of chiptune and jazz. Game Developer claimed that the album "sparked a contentious debate" over the desirability of this characteristic,^[3] and, according to Baio, before the album's release, some parts of some online jazz communities did not like the concept.^[1] Commenting on if the album can be categorized as one of jazz, Suddath compared hearing it to hearing "Miles Davis lost in Legend of Zelda".^[1]