Music student Nicholas Caleb Goss sees melodies when he watches Super Smash Bros. Melee champion Jose “Mango” Marquez flit across a stage. “He likes to style,” Goss said, describing a fight against Marquez as “energetic, surprising.” To Goss, Marquez’s playstyle is jazz, which is exactly what he turned it into.
Thundercat is a bassist who blends video games into everything he does, and whose latest album situates references to Mobile Suit Gundum and Sonic at the heart of new electronic soul music.
When video games depict a musical performance, they usually half-ass the animations. The drummer waggles his sticks around, the guitarist scrubs at the strings, the sax player sways like a drinking bird. Not Yakuza 0, man. This game takes musicians seriously.
Here’s Caleb, doing a stunning drum performance. And it’s not just random drumming. All the different hits are in sync with all the Smash Bros. moves. You can hear light cymbal hits for Fox’s short hop lasers, for example.
Undertale now has an official jazz album. Like “Determination,” the first Toby-Fox-sanctioned Undertale cover album, “Live at Grillby’s” takes a bunch of Undertale’s most memorable tracks and reimagines them—this time with gorgeous jazz. I bet Greater Dog is secretly a bomb-ass sax player.
Twenty years from now we’ll finda scruffy Ash Ketchum in a dimly-lit bar, nursing a bottle of scotch while this song plays in the background.
Before music becomes music—before it's played by musicians—it's just ink on a page. Some compositions require a great deal of ink and a lot of pages, hundreds of carefully-drawn notes bound into massive tomes of score-paper. And yet it's worth remembering that some of the greatest compositions of all time were born of…
Today, the world lost one of the greats: Jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck died at the age of 91. Among his many musical achievements, Brubeck was the man behind the iconic jazz record Time Out, a collection of odd-meter compositions best known for the famous tune "Take Five." Time Out experimented with…
Jazz trumpet genius Miles Davis had a lot of things going for him. He had a unique musical intelligence, an unparalleled instinct for musical innovation, and a reserved sense of compositional control that set his music apart from the many trumpeters of his day. And yet when you asked people to list his positive…
And so with one last musical interlude, Shinichirō Watanabe’s marvelous anime Kids on the Slope concluded its 12-episode run. Kids was something truly special—a nostalgic, dream-like tribute to friendship, love, and the mysterious power of music.
I was a band kid in high school. (This is probably not a surprise to readers of Kotaku Melodic.) I tried on a lot of hats in middle school—I tried being an athlete, tried being a brain, tried being involved in student government. But it was in the jazz band that I found a home.
Look, I'm under no illusions about jazz music's unpopularity. I grew up playing jazz, went to school to study jazz, made a living as a jazz musician for a while out of school. Jazz is beautiful, jazz is the best. And people, by and large, don't care about it at all.
Here's one for all the fans of latin music—pianist Michel Camilo is a far cry from the mellow melodies of Antonio Carlos Jobim… but that's okay. Sometimes music just has to kick ungodly amounts of ass.
It's widely held that Miles Davis' 1959 album Kind of Blue is the greatest jazz album of all time. I believe that in some jazz style-manual or another, it is actually required that people who write or talk about it refer to it as a "seminal."
Did that headline get your attention? Good, because you should go and read this super-cool piece by Kill Screen's Lana Polansky about mechanics, practice, saxophone, jazz, and Street Fighter. (It also features the amazing illustration above, drawn by Daniel Purvis.)
Courtesy of the fine folks at Reddit, we've got a video of YouTube user (and pianist) live4divin, who performs a jazz reharmonization of Jeremy Soule's main theme from Skyrim. For non-musicos, reharmonization is when you take an established melody (say, "All The Things You Are") and write new chords to go underneath…
