The 8-Bit Big Band is a Grammy Award winning contemporary symphonic Jazz orchestra created to celebrate and reimagine video game music’s most beloved hits rearranged in exciting and creative new ways in order push the envelope of how we experience the music from these legendary sound tracks as a standalone body of musical work! Formed in 2017 with the release of their debut album “Press Start” followed by their sophomore album “Choose Your Character” in 2018 and their Grammy Award winning 3rd album “Backwards Compatible” in 2022. Since the inception of the band they have garnered an online following aggregating millions of views on YouTube, and over 200,000 subscribers, followers, and listeners across the globe, selling out concert venues across the US.
Charlie Rosen, a New York-based lifelong musician and lifelong gamer, thinks of video game music as a musical tradition unto itself: the “Video Game Songbook.” Mr. Rosen’s arrangements of video game tunes are brilliant, boisterous, and—befitting the medium— delightfully playful.
- Forbes
The 8-Bit Big Band’s mission is to showcase the contemporary and ever growing body of musical work that is Video Game Music. In the past, people grew to love the songs of “the Great American Songbook” because of their experiences seeing the Broadway shows and films those timeless songs and melodies came from. In a similar way, video game music has ushered in a new era of appreciation from music lovers who grew up playing videos games and learning to love the melodies from their favorite famous game franchises. Within this contemporary “song book” exists a wide array of communally recognizable themes, lyrics, and melodies that can be reimagined and expanded upon in new and inventive ways in the same fashion that the great arrangers and jazz musicians of the past would treat The Great American Songbook.
The 8-Bit Big Band draws their music from some of the most beloved video game franchises of all time such as Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Tetris, Yoshi, Fire Emblem, Pokemon, Portal, and more, dedicating themselves to bringing large ensemble arranging into the presence of the internet and gaming era while giving the music from these games the same professional treatment in arranging, performance, and production that has gone hand in hand with the large symphonic studio jazz orchestras of the past. The band’s vocabulary ranges from the classic big band writing styles of the past, through the timeline of music’s evolution, and lands in this contemporary and eclectic no holds barred musical listening experience containing influences across genre and time.
“The [8-Bit Big Band’s] immersion into expanded, enhanced orchestral arrangements of familiar video game themes from Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Donkey Kong, and Pokémon debunked any preconceived notions of simplistic, pop-oriented theme repetition. Instead Charlie Rosen and his 8-Bit Big Band demonstrate an astoundingly rich and complex selection of arrangements for orchestra, taken from simpler video game themes that exploded the boundaries of jazz innovation. What had been brought together by a deeply gifted young arranger and instrumentalist was a generational team of exceptionally talented musicians, a quality that figured heavily in pulling off this highly creative, immersive, multimedia celebration. Rosen and his orchestra also showed that broadening the scope of material for jazz interpretation not only enriches choices for jazz fans but also draws new listeners to the genre.”
- All About Jazz