Eeeeyyyy!!! It's #ttt session 40! Before I go onto the selection I have for you this week, please check out my previous installments if you haven't already:
Anyway, for #ttt 40 I'd like to introduce to the music score of my all time favourite Japanese animation (every single album is a work of art, every single song is a masterpiece): the iconic...
Cowboy Bebop
Immodestly billed as "the work which becomes [a] new genre itself", Cowboy Bebop (originally broadcast between April 1998 and March 1999 in Japan) is a Space Western/Film Noir anime series consisting of 26 episodes (and one movie) that eventually became one of the most popular, acclaimed, and influential anime series in history — justifying the braggadocio behind that tagline. The series was created and produced by Sunrise and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe.
In the Used Future of the late 21st century, humanity has spread across the Solar System using "Hyperspace Gates" after a horrific accident devastated Earth—and wherever humanity goes, so goes its criminal element. To compensate for the increase in jurisdiction, The Space Police re-instate the bounty system of the Wild West: If a bounty hunter catches a bounty alive and delivers them to the cops, the cops pay out whatever the bounty is worth.
The series focuses on the misadventures of a ragtag group of five struggling to make a living as bounty hunters in the space-age frontier: Jet Black, a former police officer and owner of the spaceship Bebop; his partner Spike Spiegel, a martial artist on the run from a bloody past; Femme Fatale and Con Artist Faye Valentine, who is both more and somehow less than she appears; demented teen genius hacker girl Edward Wong Hau Pepelu "Ed" Tivrusky IV; and Ein, a genetically-engineered Welsh Corgi "data dog".
The Bebop's crew faces dangerous criminals, occasional starvation, their own Dark and Troubled Pasts, and a particularly disgusting refrigerator over the course of the series. The show partially defines itself by the thematic choice to give everything a rich backstory yet explaining almost nothing in full. The stories told by the show concern themselves more with the problems of the present; in many cases, history is only implied, which leaves the rest to the viewer's imagination.
Another signature trait of Cowboy Bebop is its music. Yoko Kanno composed a soundtrack made up of almost entirely of jazz music. Some of her work on this show even defies categorization. She and her band, The Seatbelts, improvised some tracks to finished footage at the moment of recording. Bebop's soundtrack exists not as a mere afterthought, but as the backbone to nearly everything else about the series; numerous scenes eschew dialogue entirely and rely on music to carry the experience.