053: NES Jams, by Shnabubula

Shnabubula (USA)
NES Jams (2012)
11 tracks, 38 minutes
Bandcamp (free download)

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s quite a few video game soundtracks on this list (under-appreciated artform yadda yadda), but this album isn’t quite that. All the tracks included on NES Jams are – as the title suggests – taken from various soundtracks of games originally made for the Nintendo Entertainment System. These are old school games from the 1980s, and their music was made up of the 8-bit bleep-bloopery that makes chiptune such a recognisable sound.

Shnabubula usually makes his own chiptune music, composed and programmed by himself, inspired by the games of yesteryear. What he does on this album, though, is a bit different. Although he programmed his arrangements of the classic NES pieces in chiptune, he also adds a radically different sound – jazz piano. It’s super intelligent stuff, musically. It’s one musician duetting with himself, with one side being meticulously programmed down to the smallest rhythm and pitch-bend and the other played with all of the subtlety and expression one might expect from a live performance.

It’s not just a chiptune backing track with a piano playing over the top, either. The melodies twist around and intertwine and neither sound gets in the way of the other. It really does sound like a human and an original-generation NES getting together at a jazz club for a musical meeting of minds. It sounds really stupid to say, but it’s really easy to forget that there is just one person creating all the sounds here and that, of course, it’s nowhere near live.

I want to highlight one track in particular that first introduced me to this album, and it still wows me every time. It’s a version of ‘Gemini Man’ from the game Mega Man 3; you can hear the original piece here for comparison. Where the original was a lightly funky and slightly rocky tune, Shnabubula turns it into an out-and-out piece of red-hot Latin jazz that provides ample opportunity for some brilliant piano improvisations. This is a track that I play over and over, just to marvel at the precision of the musical architecture at play.

I really love the aesthetic of chiptune, and (from what I’ve heard, at least) it’s been incredibly underused as a vehicle for jazz. Shnabubula marries the two excellently on NES Jams. More of this please!