Blueshift Big Band Riffs With GameRant – Video Game Music is Our Folk Music

In collaboration with iam8bit, Blueshift Big Band has dropped another installment of their Joystick Jazz series. Joystick Jazz: The Blueshift Big Band Plays Iconic Video Game Hits (BONUS LEVEL) remixes some of the greatest video game songs of all time, including tracks from Pokémon Red & Blue, Final Fantasy VII, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

GameRant had the opportunity to sit down with Blueshift Big Band's leaders, Joel Baer and Chris Parsons, to talk about their history with music, playing in a big band group in 2026, loving the Nintendo 64, the art of video game music, and how video game scores are our generation's folk music.

GameRant: How'd you both get your start in music?

Chris Parsons: I started taking piano lessons at five or six. I always wanted to play guitar, but my mom said "You're going to play piano first." And she was proven right in college when I could actually play piano, and nobody else other than piano players could. I always knew music was going to be a part of what I would do. It wasn't until high school when I got introduced to Big Band Jazz through our alma mater, Elmhurst College. That just set me on a trajectory of knowing that I could have a career in music, and it didn't involve me being on the Billboard Top 100 to sustain a career. Music's been a part of my life the whole time. Other than becoming a carpenter, there was really no other option I had for myself.

Joel Baer: I grew up watching my dad play drums. He was kind of a rock drummer – watched Ringo play on Ed Sullivan and got the bug to play drums. By the time I came along, I was watching him play pretty much weekly. When I was 11, we went to the record store, and he was like, "Oh, I had this record as a kid, and it was Buddy Rich's Swingin' New Big Band from 1966. That was my introduction to a level beyond even what my dad was, as far as what the drums were capable of. I guess music was always there for me. I started playing when I was around seven and started playing professionally, or at least playing with people, when I was in my teens.

How did you two meet and start collaborating?

Chris Parsons: We met at Elmhurst College in my senior year. Joel had transferred in, so we played one year together, and then really hit it off and got along. We then played some blues gigs together, some church gigs together. And then, after a number of years of not playing regularly, Joel had the idea to start a reading big band, which is how Blue Shift started. We just played once a month on a Sunday night. So it's a good hang. Pretty quickly, we shifted into wanting to do original music, original recordings. But yeah, Joel and I have known each other a long time, and as musicians, if you want to hang out with your friends, you tend to start bands with them. Otherwise, you don't ever see them.

Are there any particular video game soundtracks or songs that have really influenced and inspired your sound?

Joel Baer: Oh, well, I'm gonna take that one first. So I love the music of Sonic 2. It's featured on Bonus Level with Casino Night Zone. Besides Super Mario 64, Sonic 2 is probably the game that we've recorded arrangements and done remixes from the most. I played Sonic 2 when I was a kid, and that soundtrack – I mean... like Chemical Plant Zone – that soundtrack just grabbed me and kept me wanting to play the game, even through the frustration of playing some of those levels. So I don't know if it informed our sound, but it certainly informed the direction I was interested in going when we were covering video game music, which was, for the most part, retro and old school games that I loved when I was a kid.

Chris Parsons: I grew up with the Nintendo 64. It's the sound that I love the most, particularly Mario, in terms of specific video game music. I'll be honest, it wasn't really something that I was aware of until Joel proposed this idea of doing video game music. And the thing that was enticing to me about it was that it was a whole other candidate of music that our genre, big band jazz, never really tapped into. What became jazz standards over the last seven years were old Broadway musicals that nobody knew what musicals they were from. So this was an opportunity to say, "Let's get our writers and arrangers to find melodies and harmonies that were inspired, that inspired them from a canon that we were all familiar with growing up". So for me, it's been great to see how our writers' and arrangers' new information can help reinvigorate the love of this big band music that we have. What's been fun for me is to see this formula, this style, this instrumentation we love, with new sounds, new approaches by all the people we love working with.

Where did the idea of Joystick Jazz originate from?

Joel Bael: I feel like video game music for our generation is kind of our folk music – these concise little melodies that we hear over and over and over again. They're perfect for making into larger arrangements and adding material, doing what we do with them. I was looking for something that felt authentic to my experience, but was something different than what I was doing at the time. I didn't really listen to a ton of VGM bands, besides The Advantage, which is a band I really love, but I thought there was so much potential for great melodies, great harmonies. And as Chris said, it's relatively untapped. There aren't a lot of big bands doing this, so we get to be the first big band to approach an arrangement, like Redial from Bomberman or something like that. It's cool. That's something that you can't do with jazz standards. They've been done a bunch of times.

I love that idea of video game music as our generation's folk music. Building on that a little bit more, what do you feel like are the differences between performing something from a video game and arranging it, versus something from the more traditional musical canon?

Chris Parsons: People have an attachment to these melodies. It's not the music that your grandparents, your parents were listening to, and that music is important to listen to and important to know. When we did the Ocarina of Time medley on our first Joystick Jazz record, I got really familiar with that arrangement and playing it. Then during the pandemic, I revisited Ocarina of Time, got to the last dungeon, and I'm like, "Why do I know this melody?" I'm like, "You idiot, you played it!" Big band allows people to have some kind of a connection to the music, even if it's presented in a way they don't necessarily know. The idea of, in 2026, having a big band is pretty niche, but we do it because we love it. We also do it because we want people to be familiar with this instrumentation, this style, this presentation of music. Like Joel said, it was an untapped resource of connections to things people grew up with in the same way our parents grew up with the Beatles and their parents grew up with Glenn Miller. We just so happen to be Sonic and Mario.

What's the song selection process like for each volume of Joystick Jazz? How do you determine which tracks you want to arrange? What's the copyright situation, and getting permission to do specific tracks like?

Joel Baer: As far as the copyright goes, iam8bit has been the most helpful with that, because we don't deal with the licensing ourselves. These days, we always run a tune list by them to make sure that everything is licensable that we want to do before we tackle a project. But when it started, there were tunes that we were interested in, but also that our arrangers were interested in. On Joystick Jazz Volume One, there's an arrangement of Flash Man from Mega Man 2. When we were in school, we had a buddy named Ritchie Payless who, for one of his classes, recreated the entire Mega Man 2 soundtrack in MIDI for a project. And he played trombone in the jazz band. So when it came time to do some arranging, I knew he was the perfect person to ask, because he would have a take on this tune. That's more than just the melody, you know. Outside of that, I think the first thing is, do we like the game? Banjo and Ocarina of Time – these are games that I played a bunch, like Sonic. Then there's the other layer of the arrangers having something that they are really interested in doing. So we worked with Joe Clark, who did Grim Fandango on Joystick Jazz Volume Two, and he came to us with this idea of doing a suite from that game. I had not played the game at that point, but I had heard the music, and I thought it was a great idea. He just did another for us. It's not available yet, but it's a 45-minute Final Fantasy VI suite. He came to us with that idea, "I want to do one game, and I want to do a big presentation from a single game". So sometimes it's our arrangers who are driving the selections.

Are there any major games you still want to cover that you haven't yet for Joystick Jazz?

Joel Baer: Chrono Trigger! I mean, we're doing Final Fantasy VI, but it hasn't been released yet, so there's a bunch of that. I always say that we're a very Nintendo 64 forward band. We have a lot of more Nintendo 64 stuff coming out. I can't give you a release date, but things we're playing live right now – like Star Fox, Dire, Dire Docks, Lost Woods – just the best of the Nintendo, 64. GoldenEye is something that we're working on doing an arrangement for. Those are all games that I love, and I spend a lot of time playing, and have a deep connection to.

Chris Parsons: Admittedly, my knowledge of video games kind of stopped with the GameCube. I played the Wii for a little bit, so this has been a fun way to get back into playing video games, which is a little hard right now. I'm in grad school, and I have two kids, but when that's done, I'm getting back into it. I already want to get a Switch. What's been fun for me is just learning how vast this world is and how passionate people are. We had the good fortune of playing Mag Fest at the beginning of 2025, and I was just blown away by the passion people have for this music. It might sound like a cop out, but I really don't know much about it. When our friend Ritchie Payless comes up to us, or Christian Sanchez, who's written some of the Sonic stuff, comes to us for an idea, it's a nice new window into a different world I don't know about. And then we hear these melodies and go, "Oh, wow. This is how old? This is 20 years old. Why haven't I heard this?" And that's what's exciting for me. I'll figure out what video game I want to tackle next, because we kind of exploited Super Mario 64 as much as we can.

You're very Nintendo 64 forward, so I'm sure Koji Kondo's compositions come up a lot, but are there any other notable and favorite video game composers you just love tackling, or want to really dive into?

Joel Baer: Yes, Masato Nakamura, Sonic 1 and 2. We're not finished with Sonic 2 as far as stuff that we want to record and put out. If I put out music from that entire game, I think my life would be complete. Anything Grant Kirkhope. We're doing an upcoming gig with strings from Perfect Dark, GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie. David Wise, Yasunori Mitsuda from Chrono Trigger, everything Nobuo Uematsu. We've got a whole repertoire of Koji Kondo, stuff that's unreleased on recordings that we're working on. Koji is the OG for me. He was my entry point into game music with Masato Nakamura. Super Mario World... the melodies from that game. That's my childhood.

With your latest release, what was the reasoning behind going with a Bonus Level launch, as opposed to a more traditional volume four?

Joel Baer: When we were developing Joystick Jazz Two and Three, Chris and I had an idea about what we were going to do next, and we presented an idea for Volume Four to iam8bit that had a lot more Mario in it. And they were like, "What if it was a whole Mario thing? What if you had a whole separate record that was Mario?" And we thought it was a great idea. During the Volume Three sessions to record some extra Mario material, we had time in the studio to tackle some arrangements that we had been working on, but didn't have a plan for. So we recorded all those tunes with just a "we'll see what happens" mentality, because we have what we needed for the other records. So we sent them to iam8bit, and we said, "Hey, this is a short EP, but it's cool material that we're really passionate about. Are you interested in putting this out?" And, of course, iam8bit, being who they are, came up with an amazing way to package it, to present it with a 45 RPM, which I don't think anybody's talking about enough of.

On that note, vinyl had a bit of a comeback these past few years. Records are still very huge. How do you personally resonate with that?

Joel Baer: I should have done this in front of my record collection. I love vinyl. And you know, the great thing about loving big band vinyl is, it's cheap. Nobody else is listening to it. So I have a pretty big big band vinyl collection. I love putting out records. I really love it. It's so cool to hold it in your hand. It's a physical sort of manifestation of the entire process of coming up with material, working with collaborators, recording with the band, and then finally having this actual physical thing to show for it from the musician's side. To be able to present that to the listeners is so cool.

Chris Parsons: I love the medium, it's tangible. It's something that you can hold. Joel and I came up in a time when CDs were still big, so I have a pretty good record collection, but I have 1,000s of CDs. What's been great to see at gigs when we're selling the vinyl, is the teenagers. It's kids that have had Spotify and Apple Music since they were babies. They didn't have CD players in the car or record players. I recently had the chance to finally set my record player back up, put a new needle on, calibrate the whole thing, and it just forces you to sit down for 22 minutes and listen to a piece of music. It doesn't make it passive. It makes it very active.

It might be like picking a favorite child, but give us a favorite track from the Joystick Jazz series.

Joel Baer: Oh, I know mine. It's the Castle Theme on Volume Three, from Super Mario World. It's Neil Carson's crazy arrangement of the Castle Theme, which is Koji Kondo's composition. I love the original, and I love playing it live, and I like listening to it. I think it's an amazing piece of music. It's an amazing piece of big band music.

I'm surprised you didn't pick something from Sonic 2.

Joel Baer: If I can cheat and pick two, then I'm gonna pick Aquatic Ruin Zone, which is an arrangement that Sam Wolsk did for us. And I love playing that one too. It's fun.

Chris Parsons: My favorite one is still the Ocarina of Time medley, and I don't know how much of it has to do with it being on the record, or just one of my favorite things to play live and conduct. When we were at Mag Fest last year, I had to conduct it, and I had a crowd of like, 1,000 people behind me, and you just start playing the first few notes, and then everybody realizes what it is. That felt really good.

So what's next for Joystick Jazz's future?

Joel Baer: Oh, I don't think we can say exactly what's next. I can say that we're going to be in the studio this coming weekend. So I don't know when this is going to be out, but we'll be in the studio recording a new record that will be out very soon.

What's been your favorite part about collaborating and working together, both on these video game arrangements and your own original works together?

Chris Parsons: The fact that we're playing big band music in 2026. We're very lucky that there's a strong big band scene here in Chicago, and people like it, regardless of what kind of music we're playing. I think our big appeal too, is we have older people who love big band music. They don't play video games, but they love what we do, because it's just new sounds. For me, this shouldn't work today – having a band of 17-18, sometimes 19 people on stage – coordinating schedules, putting rehearsals together. This is something that in the world we grew up with going to college, big bands only existed in college. They don't exist in the real world, but ours does. And we're playing at least twice a month, which is a little unheard of, and sometimes more. I put all the set lists together. We already have 10 gigs this year. I love big band music. This isn't something that's supposed to be happening today, but Joel and I are pulling it off, and I think it comes from the fact that we're passionate about it. We don't cut corners. We went into it knowing we weren't going to make much money. This is definitely a passion project. Working with arrangers and collaborators, it's become its own little orbit of people that want to be, and I get a little overwhelmed with that, that we have fans. It's like we're not supposed to have fans. Nobody's supposed to like this, except for Joel and I. But people love it. I've met great people that have a lot to say with their art, and we get to be a vehicle for that.

What do you want your audiences and fans to really take away from your music and your concerts?

Joel Baer: I would say that we take the music very seriously, but that we don't take ourselves too seriously. Blue Shift shows are fun. You can see that we're having fun on stage. If you watch the Mag Fest video, we're having a good time with our friends, but we're all focused on the execution on stage, making sure this music is presented properly – music that, I think, sometimes isn't taken seriously. We take it seriously in the performance, in the arranging, but we also love to have fun on stage with each other. If someone's playing a solo that we like, we're going to tell that person that we like what they're playing and that we're vibing to the music too. We're vibing to the music that we're creating with the audience. It's kind of a reciprocal thing. Chris, what do you think?

Chris Parsons: I think that audiences see a stage full of people that care and have fun. This isn't easy to pull off all the time, but to have this group of people... This is actually a band. In our world, with this kind of music, it's hard to sustain the mentality of having a regular group of people, but even our subs are regulars. This isn't just a thing people are doing in addition to their other work. This is a priority for all of our musicians in our band, and that comes through on the stage. It's, it's like the Count Basie Orchestra or the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra bands that Joel and I admired and kind of modeled ourselves after. That's what you're gonna see. You're gonna see a family up there.

On this subject of taking the music seriously, is video game music art?

Joel Baer: Video game music is art, yeah. I would not say that all video game music is great, but I would say the great stuff is amazing. And I think if you start considering the limitations of the hardware in the 8-bit and 16-bit era in particular, and the magic of Koji Kondo and Masato Nakamura, it's amazingly beautiful. How is that on a Super Nintendo cartridge? I think there's a certain generation of people for whom video game music was like bleeps and bloops, and it's hard for them because they didn't come into the next era to hear how good it could be. I think all you have to do is listen to something like Final Fantasy VI. I actually think that the Super Nintendo's sound is pretty charming. But even if you were just coming into it cold, I think you could play something for somebody, and they would think it was beautiful music.

Favorite video games of all time?

Joel Baer: Oh, man, Super Mario World, Sonic 2, Star Fox 64, GoldenEye 007, and I'm gonna give you one more, Final Fantasy VII. It's not my favorite soundtrack, but as far as the Final Fantasy games, it's my favorite.

What about you, Chris?

Chris Parsons: Super Mario 64. It's jus the best one. And I'm not really an authority on video games, but I know I'm right in that.