CHICAGO — In a town of great big bands, Blueshift stands out. During a recent show at Fulton Street Collective — a haven for the city’s improvising vanguard — the group played through “Castle Theme,” effortlessly weaving together far-flung jazz subgenres. Before that was a rhythmically intricate account of “Vampire Killer,” and singer-saxophonist Abram Collier’s arrangement of “Burn My Dread,” crowning the pointillistic ensemble writing with his own rough-hewn croon.

Don’t feel sheepish if you don’t recognize those tunes. They’re not standards, but plucked from video games — “Super Mario World,” the 1986 game “Castlevania” and Sega’s “Persona” franchise, to be specific.

Blueshift gigs all over the region. They’ll return to Fulton Street Collective again on Dec. 3, playing a Final Fantasy suite by prolific local arranger Joe Clark, but you can also catch them onstage with the Rockford Symphony Orchestra, playing video game themes rendered as lush symphonic jazz, and even at Andy’s, the tourist-friendly River North club.

“Those people walk in and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to hear some jazz.’ Then they hear Mario, and they’re like, ‘What?’” says Joel Baer, Blueshift’s drummer and co-founder.

The world of video game music — VGM, as it’s called for short — is vast and devoted. But it’s not novel; video game music has very much ascended as an industry and it shows no sign of slowing. Entire festivals and conventions are organized around video game music, from metal to rock to hip-hop, and orchestral concerts of video game music have been hot tickets for over a decade. Next year’s MAGFest, the country’s leading VGM festival, sold out within hours, even before it announced its lineup. According to a Chicago Symphony representative, tickets to its forthcoming “Legend of Zelda” anniversary concert, which started at $105 a pop, sold out the day they went on sale.

But the genre’s most explosive growth, at least around these parts, seems to be happening in the subgenre of video game jazz. Besides Blueshift, Chicago is also home to a lounge-style VGM combo (The Social Links), a band that specializes in music from Japanese RPGs (Crystal’s Chronicles) and another that turns “Chrono Trigger” tunes into riotous jazz-rock (Kingdom of Zeal, releasing its debut album in January). On Nov. 14, at Chicago Danztheatre, you can catch two in one evening: Andy’s Critical Hits, led by reedist Andy Lopez, and tap dancer — yes, tap — Jamie Demeny’s 4-Player Game.

That’s not even an exhaustive list. Fittingly, the whole scene stays in touch on Discord, a messaging and social platform preferred by gamers.

“Any week of the month, check the (Discord), and there might be VGM bands playing Thursday, Friday, Saturday,” says Sam Frosch, a bassist in the jazz-fusion quartet Elite Four.

That video game jazz in Chicago has gone from a trend to a community is largely due to the efforts of Kevin Zhou. The freelance keyboardist and music director graduated from the University of Illinois in 2023, the same year popular music YouTuber Adam Neely had put out a viral video on the “Nintendo-ification of jazz.” The half-hour video, in part, highlighted the VGM jazz jams in big cities like New York.

When Zhou and his friends moved to Chicago, they expected to find a similar standing jam and came up empty-handed. “Being young and dumb and full of inexperience, I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’ll just start it,’” Zhou recalls.

In November 2024, he hosted the first VGM Jam at Midlane Esports, a gaming haven in Logan Square. After Midlane closed earlier this year, Zhou now alternates the monthly jams between Clara, a Wicker Park cocktail bar with a robust music program (next jam Nov. 11), or The CheckOut, a Lakeview chamber venue and cabaret (Dec. 18). His septet, Kevin & the Quicksavers, is the jam’s house band, with others occasionally swapping in.

Professional players anchor the jams, from the jazz world and elsewhere. One of the Quicksavers’ drummers is Bobby Shields, whom Baer calls the “godfather of the VGM scene” in Chicago. For more than a decade, Shields has been a member of Arc Impulse, the city’s longest-running VGM group, and runs Chicago VGM Fest, which, since 2022, has hosted local and touring groups every August at Beat Kitchen in North Center.

But in contrast to cutthroat jams at venues like the Green Mill or Hungry Brain, Zhou endeavors to make the VGM jam the most welcoming in the city, regardless of skill level. Less experienced players can gain confidence by sharing the bandstand with video game music veterans like Shields but just join in on the head, which is written out for their benefit.

“Sometimes they can’t hold onto a tune, or they can’t follow the form. But my main goal is that they’re able to play with a band; they’re able to play music that they love,” says Zhou.

The viral 2023 video that inspired Zhou put forward a provocative argument: If jazz standards emerged from the public’s general familiarity with showtunes, video game music has become, in some ways, a millennial equivalent to the Great American Songbook. Indeed, the music being so well-loved and recognizable is key to its popularity. At this point, some of the most famous game franchises are well over 40 years old.

Bassist Crystal Rebone — who leads the band Crystal’s Chronicles, punning on a “Final Fantasy” sub-series — has seen the cross-generational appeal of VGM in live time, through her day job as a high school orchestra teacher.

“My students just did a video game theme concert, and so many parents were like, ‘I remember this from when I was a kid,’” she says. “There’s a nostalgia, and also, it’s just what people are listening to, because we play a lot of video games.”

Neither Baer nor Blueshift co-founder Chris Parsons are particularly big gamers, they admit. But after starting the big band as a reading ensemble in 2017, Baer got curious about incorporating music “that connects to people a little bit more.”

The first video game tune they ever arranged was “Chemical Plant Zone” from “Sonic the Hedgehog 2.” By 2019, Blueshift had amassed enough arrangements to play a full set of video game music. Now, just seven years in, Blueshift has even gotten on the radar of “Sonic” developer Sega, who commissioned them for an album of music from its “Persona” franchise. Since the album came out in the spring, its sales and streaming numbers, Baer and Parsons confess, have been “insane.”

“(Audiences) don’t know that we’re doing it in a Duke Ellington style or a Bill Holman style,” Parsons says. “It’s just like, ‘That’s Mario,’ or Metroid, or Zelda.”

Musically and structurally, the repetitive nature of VGM lends itself particularly well to traditional jazz forms. Since vintage systems had limited amounts of memory, songs could only be a certain length before they had to repeat, on an endless — and, after enough hours of gameplay, unforgettable — loop. Even modern games cycle their music, by necessity. Any recorded music has a determined length, but it must be able to back an indeterminate length of gameplay.

Jazz standards play on the same concept. The chorus — the recognizable, repeated kernel, traditionally taken from the Great American Songbook — becomes the head, but through solos and other transformations, the tune itself can be stretched indefinitely.

“For all the top-tier video game stuff — the Koji Kondo stuff, the (Nobuo) Uematsu stuff — it all works no matter what you do to it, just like a standard,” Baer says, referencing the beloved composers for Nintendo’s flagship titles and the “Final Fantasy” franchise. “You can change the harmony, you can change the rhythm, you can make it a different style, and somehow the melody still works.”

It’s not just Chicago cats, either. Video game music has well hit the jazz mainstream. Alto player Patrick Bartley is revered for his inventive riffs on game tunes, mostly with his J-MUSIC Ensemble. Trumpeter and singer Benny Benack collaborated with another VGM jazz titan, the New York-based 8-Bit Big Band. Inspired by hours at home playing “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” during the pandemic with his kids, saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and his Hero Trio retooled the game’s bucolic trio into a groovy number on his 2022 EP, also called “Animal Crossing.” Even Kenny Garrett has performed music from the open-world fantasy game “Elden Ring.”

But for a city with such a deep improvising tradition, it’s not surprising to Shields, the drummer and VGM Fest organizer, that the scene here is becoming “very much cornerstoned in jazz.”

“It’s blowing up,” he says, “and it’s getting bigger.”

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