When navigating the jazz world, it’s dangerous to go alone: take The 8-Bit Big Band.

Since 2018, they’ve spellbound audiences with interpretations of music from across the video game multiverse. Now, the jazz and pops orchestra — helmed by GRAMMY-winning composer and arranger Charlie Rosen — is back with their fourth album, Game Changer — due November 10, 2023 via Rosen’s Teamchuck Records.

Jazziz declared that the 8-Bit Big Band “is redefining the concept of a modern big band.” All About Jazz praised them for “embrac[ing] the concept… mak[ing] it not plausible but memorable.” And JazzTimes summed up the sprawling ensemble’s ambitious ethos: “Charlie Rosen is dead serious about what he calls the ‘Great Video Game Songbook.’”

Game Changer features reimagined classics from the soundtracks of Super Mario 3D World (“Super Bell Hill”), Final Fantasy 7 (“Tifa’s Theme”), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (“Song of Storms”), and other classic games across major platforms.

1. Intro to Album 4
2. Can You Feel the Sunshine? (ft. Joel Waggoner) – from “Sonic R”
3. I Wanna Take You for a Ride (ft. Lawrence) – inspired by “Marvel vs. Capcom 2”
4. Pollyanna (ft. Alan H. Green) – from “Mother/Earthbound”
5. Super Bell Hill – from “Super Mario 3D World”
6. You Wouldn’t Know (ft. Benny Benack III) – from “Lego Dimensions: Portal”
7. Beneath the Mask (ft. Aisha Jackson) – from “Persona 5”
8. Mabe Village – from “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening”
9. Tifa’s Theme (ft. Chloe Rowlands) – from “Final Fantasy 7”
10. Passing Breeze – from “Outrun”
11. Song of Storms (ft. Patrick Bartley) – from “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”
12. Last Surprise (ft. Jonah Nilsson) – from “Persona 5”

This brilliantly inventive new recording opens on a short, yet empowering Intro to Album 4 and then first out the gates is the free wheeling Can You Feel the Sunshine? and the smooth grooved I Wanna Take You For a Ride (which features the now infamous eight-second loop of meme music therein), and then we are brought forth the lush R&B of Pollyanna, and both the upbeat and joyful Super Bell Hill and the totally swinging You Wouldn’t Know (which features Benny Benack III, a renowned trumpeter and vocalist on the New York scene and is here modeled after Dean Martin’s arrangement of “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.”).

Along next is the neo-soul hued Beneath the Mask and the veritably glistening Mabe Village (from 1993’s “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening,” and which is a co-arrangement with Button Masher — who won a GRAMMY in 2021 for his collaboration with this band), and they are themselves backed seamlessly by the shimmering, Disney-esque Tifa’s Theme, the gently frenetic rhythms of Passing Breeze, the album rounding out on the emboldened Song of Storms (which utilizes Patrick Bartley’s absolutely bombastic alto sax vocabulary), closing on the emphatically-charged Last Surprise.

The 8-Bit Big Band’s fourth dispatch contains even more first-call musicians from the New York jazz scene. “You Wouldn’t Know,” from Lego Dimensions: Portal, features the acclaimed trumpeter and vocalist Benny Benack III. “Tifa’s Theme,” from Final Fantasy 7, features luminous trumpeter Chloe Rowlands of Westerlies fame, “Song of Storms” features the incredible Patrick Bartley, and “Last Surprise” featuring keyboard player and vocalist phenom Jonah Nilsson of the band Dirty Loops.

The guests on Game Changer also hail from the highest echelons of theater. After “Intro to Album 4,” a magisterial overture reminiscent of mid-century Broadway, vocalist Joel Waggoner brings a Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra-style panache to “Can You Feel the Sunshine?” from the 1997 Sega Saturn game “Sonic R.”

“I Wanna Take You For a Ride” hails from the seminal fighting game “Marvel vs. Capcom 2” — well, an eight-second loop of music therein, in which a woman sings the title on repeat, which has become something of a viral meme among gamers.

www.the8bitbigband.com