Videogames & jazz.
At first glance, these two things may not seem to belong together, but on closer inspection, they are surprisingly closely related: jazz and digital games, the two hobbies that fill my life like nothing else and keep me busy.
Jazz, especially in its freer form, uses improvisation, repetition, and a high degree of individualization in style to constantly re-explore the meaning of the piece being played and the limits of the musical genre. For me, this symbolizes the flow in which art and art appreciation move and which is constantly being renegotiated by the audience.
First things first: in my opinion, digital games are much closer to performance art than to the often-cited medium of film. The graphic, content-related, and stylistic pandering to Hollywood and film in general is, in my view, one of the cardinal sins of modern computer and video games.
Video games, as an inherently open art form—that is, as works that can only be grasped through their reception, i.e., that only actually appear when played (before that, they are merely invisible zeros and ones in a digital memory)—reflect much of the jazz music genre in my view: Analogous to jazz musicians, who give a piece a new form through improvisation, video game players also reshape the game and their experience of it with each playthrough.
Philosopher Daniel Martin Feige comments: “The joke of computer games as works of art is that the player plays through themselves while playing these computer games.”
The works, the jazz piece on the one hand and the video game on the other, remain in flux. Their experience is reimagined with each performance, and their essence—what it means to be this song or this game—is renegotiated with each improvisation or playthrough.
It may not be obvious, but the way jazz and video games reveal themselves to us in their respective forms is, as I hope I have been able to show, astonishingly similar.
Now to the episode: this proximity is particularly evident in Ape Out. A game with a top-down perspective and graphics reminiscent of 1970s action movie posters, in which the aim is to break a gorilla out of a zoo. The entire soundscape of the game is dynamically generated from the movements of the monkey controlled by the players. Every step, punch, and jump represents a specific drum sound. The gameplay thus creates an individual solo drum soundtrack. Each time is unique. This recording for vinyl was created by the developer playing through the entire game. Perhaps the most extraordinary soundtrack in my collection…
Apart from that, the episode mainly deals with games that “merely” have a jazz soundtrack based on an aesthetic decision; a quasi-coincidental convergence of music genre and video game, rather than jazz through gameplay.
Jazz Noir has taken up a surprising amount of space; the smoke-filled lounge music of crime novels since the 1940s. A subgenre of jazz that, detached from the crime novel attached to it, doesn’t really touch me that much. But oh, how I love whodunits…
In the bizarre games Moon and Hypnospace Outlaw, on the other hand, there are entire albums by fictional (jazz) bands waiting to be discovered (and listened to!) by the players.
The program is framed by jazz interpretations of Zelda soundtracks. In more “classical” instrumentation, the compositions seem strangely familiar and yet completely different from how they are remembered in the beeping of the chips of the old consoles.
If you found the initial thoughts stimulating, I recommend two books by Daniel Martin Feige, professor of philosophy and aesthetics, both published by Suhrkamp (in german):
Philosophie des Jazz.
Computerspiele. Eine Ästhetik.
Sendedatum: 03/12/2025 19:00 - 03/12/2025 20:00
Sendung: lange nicht gehört.
Tracklist:The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time [Zelda & Jazz]
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [The Z-Suits]
Hypnospace Outlaw [Klyfta]
Moon: Anti-RPG
Genesis Noir
Ape Out
Sam & Max: Save the World
Grim Fandango
To Hell With The Ugly
Frog Detective
Later Alligator
L.A. Noire
Arcadian Atlas
Botanicula
Katamari Damacy
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [Zelda & Jazz]