ABSTRACT
Every television episode of the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop (1998–99) begins with the same jazz piece that sets the tone and serves as a kind of mission statement for the show. In this introduction, the saucy notes of “Tank” (performed by The Seatbelts) weave in and out among the fragmented images that splash and slide across the screen. Layered within the images of the main characters and their spacecraft are fleeting lines of text that flash across the screen multiple times, often broken into snippets. When pieced together, those lines describe a modern movement in jazz that started at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in 1941. The artists there began a creative competition in an attempt to play jazz “freely,” and this competition resulted in the development of bebop. The opening text links this bebop movement to the exploits of the Bebop crew (and presumably the creators of Cowboy Bebop) who are playing “freely” or experimenting without “fear of risky things” in the hope of creating a “new genre”.
