More creations were in store for the audience as Rosen picked up his fretless electric bass and inflected a dedication to the late, seminal bassist and innovator Jaco Pastorius with "Dire, Dire Docks" theme from a Super Mario videogame release.
With conducting hands at the ready, he launched into a Super Mario Bros theme, not wasting a moment to connect a traditional standard with a videogame overlay using Frank Sinatra's "I've Got the World on a String," with an emphasis on the string section to add richness to the orchestration, reminiscent of Nelson Riddle. With carnival-like showmanship and wide smile, wearing a glittering gold and black-striped showbiz jacket and baseball cap, Rosen exuded an infectious enthusiasm.
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To add to the multimedia effect and visual reinforcement of the musical context, both arrangements performed by Eiene and later by Charlie Rosen's 8-Bit Big Band, were accompanied by an overhead stage screen simultaneously running the very video game that the orchestra was covering.Īfter Eiene's set, the main attraction, bandleader Charlie Rosen, took to the stage with his 8-Bit Big Band, a 33-member Jazz/Pop orchestra complete with full horn and string sections. Also featuring a variety of solo moments from other band members, including the electric guitarist, trombonist, pianist and a myriad of other horn players, Eiene left little doubt about the power of his arrangements and the musicianship of a young jazz orchestra charged up by their generation's videogame songbook. While telling stories about the creative process and happy accidents that took him to this genre, he also easily demonstrated a fluid command of his instruments, taking an extensive solo on both the baritone and tenor saxophone. With their tight and in-synch orchestration, deep in talent, Eiene led his band through renditions and reincarnations of "Veilstone City" "Eternal City" "Mii Channel" "Underground" and "Eternal Forest" moving easily from one Jazz style to the next. The evening's first performance began with friend and fellow bandleader Carlos Eiene, who performs under the stage name "InsaneInTheRain" and showed off his original arrangements of videogame themes with an orchestra of students from Berklee College of Music. Now, his generation, with millions of gamers, are connecting with their shared experience. With a self-proclaimed "esoteric tooth in musical taste," Rosen has a thirst and drive to "know all about all kinds of musicpast, present, worldwide and future." Speaking directly to the concept behind melding videogame themes to a 30+ piece Jazz orchestra, he likens the concept to a "videogame" songbook, "because we have a shared experience of a new body of mediawhich is video gameswhich represents a ton of people." Rosen draws a parallel to other generations that listened to Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald perform Cole Porter's songbook. Rosen refers to the on-the-job training he banked from his Broadway arrangement and orchestration experience, empowering him to see Broadway shows as a "vehicle with which you can take any genre and dramatize it and use that genre's ingredients for a full emotional range."įast-forward to his current orchestra, the 8-Bit Big Band, whose live performance videos on YouTube have had more than 30 million views since 2017. Rosen, already a veteran bandleader of two jazz orchestras including the 8-Bit Big Band, started Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band in 2012, where he arranged classical musical theater numbers into music performed by a Jazz orchestra featuring Broadway performers taking vocal duties. Instead, with a nearly two-hour set, Rosen and his 8-Bit Big Band demonstrated an astoundingly rich and complex selection of arrangements for orchestra, taken from simpler videogame themes that exploded the boundaries of jazz innovation.
The show'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. An exceptionally gifted musician capable of playing over 70 instruments, Rosen, at 29, has already been involved in arranging Broadway shows as an associate musical director and orchestrator for American Psycho, Be More Chill, and Prince of Broadway. He wowed an audience spanning the generations from pre-Nintendo to xBox. However, on March 1st at the Berklee Performance Center, Charlie Rosen, "gamer," multi-instrumentalist and orchestral composer/arranger brought the two together with his 30+ piece jazz orchestra, the 8-Bit Big Band. When you think about video game themes, the word "jazz" does not easily come to mind. Charlie Rosen's 8-Bit Big Band with special guest Grace Kelly
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