The New Standard

A look at Yoko Kanno and the soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop

It’s late at night, sometime around 2005. I’m in my parents basement, listening to ESPN Radio and probably playing NHL 2004 or something. And then it comes on the radio: that countdown, the bursts of horns and a distinctive bass line. It was “Tank!” by The Seatbelts, famously used as the theme to Cowboy Bebop, a Japanese anime. And I remember thinking, “This is really cool.”

Cowboy Bebop only ran for one season in Japan, airing a total of 26 episodes. It was popular enough to spawn a manga - I used to have the Tokyopop translation of them - and a movie, too. Coming out at the tail end of the 90s, it was of a piece with other sci-fi anime that examines contemporary anxieties through the lens of the future: Its take on late capitalism and existential themes about life isn’t too dissimilar from Serial Experiments Lain, for example.

 It gained a nice second life thanks to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block, where it started airing in 2001. The first anime to air there, it’s been called a gateway to anime. Indeed, it’s popularity among young adults (or people who just stay up too late in general) probably helped pave the way for shows like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto and more. 

But unlike those shows, Cowboy Bebop had a hell of a soundtrack. 

The music was generally all composed and arranged by Yoko Kanno, a musician best known for her work on various video game and anime soundtracks. In the early 1990s, Kanno was studying in university when she was approached to compose the soundtrack to a video game. Said Kanno in a 2014 interview with Red Bull Academy:

“Keoi was a small company at the time… I think it fell in my lap because they heard I was a person who could write songs quickly.”

It launched her career. 

Soon Kanno worked on anime series like Macross Plus and Vision of Escaflowne, where her music dabbled with classical themes. There’s the sweeping, almost Romantic strings of “Distant Fields” from the Nobunaga’s Edition soundtrack. Or take the Macross Soundtrack: at times I hear Satie, at others John Adams’s “The Chairman Dances” in its wonderful mix of strings and percussion. 

For Cowboy Bebop, however, Kanno went in a different direction. Back in her university days, she travelled across the US on a bus, soaking up influences from a variety of styles. But what impacted her the most was the way rhythm is used to different effect in a variety of genres. The way a drummer can swing, the way a groove evolves. From the Red Bull interview:

“It was through this trip I learned that even within a genre there are differences in style. That was really exciting for me. I learned that the beat is a form of language.”

This experience would pay off in spades on the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack. 

For a series that didn’t have a long run, Cowboy Bebop got a lot of soundtracks. Four different records, plus another for the movie, and a box set of alternate takes, live material and album highlights. The soundtrack tackles a variety of forms: there’s 70s-style rock, hard-driving metal and even a country-tinged rocker (“Diggin’”). But what it remains best known for is the jazzier tunes. And even within this genre, Kanno’s scores and charts show the wide range of her influences and ideas.

On a song like “NY Rush” the group leans hard into a late-60s style of bop: two horns twist around each other for theme, the drummer swings and an electric piano anchors the groove. It wouldn’t feel out of place among a Cannonball Adderley record, one of those ones that George Duke played on. In the anime, a clip of it’s used as the score during a chase scene, but on its own it's a nice little performance.

Conversely, “Space Lion” goes more in a spiritual jazz direction. Against a slight synth backing, a sax gently probes around, taking long pauses between phrases and going for a rich, full tone. After a little while, percussion and voices enter. At times it reminds me of Jan Garbarek’s more ambient records for ECM, although the playing here never quite matches his intensity.

A good example of what Kanno means about differences in the same style can be heard in two variations of the same theme. “The Egg and I” starts off with a piccolo playing the theme, soon joined by slide guitar and a droning bagpipe - a fusion of a curious sort, but one that more than anything suggests the outdoors and the rural. But on “The Egg and You,” the same theme is played by a piano trio with a pulsing sort of rhythm. The theme is drawn out and its melody is bounced around for the solo. It’s almost a Vince Guaraldi pastiche, a melody you could hear played at any local jazz club.

I think my favourite is “Want It All Back,” a vocal one where a clavinet introduces the theme before drums and an electric guitar enter, playing a driving rhythm. Horns burst out of the corners, the guitar crashes around and the band works up a great groove. Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t heard this one covered more.  

But one that’s covered quite a bit is Cowboy Bebop’s iconic theme song “Tank!”. From the countdown (“Okay, 3, 2, 1, let’s jam’), to the pulsating bass riff, to the way the horns just explode, it’s a tune that’s bursting with energy and ambition. The horns enter with thick, hard lines, while a guitar, bongos and an upright bass push the groove along. It’s Count Basie’s “The Kid From Red Bank” but with the pedal to the floor. The album version lets a sax stretch out for a solo, but the TV edit cuts right to the coda and a screeching finale. It doesn’t just introduce the show, it sets a mood. It rollicks along, sucking the listener in and although it’s just over three minutes, it can leave the listener exhausted. 

There are dozens of covers of this one on YouTube, from people as diverse as the GCSU Jazz Band, a pickup group of Ohio musicians at an event in Cincinnati, and the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts Jazz Alumni. And earlier this month, Hal Leonard (the people who publish The Real Book, now in its sixth edition) released charts for their own arrangement of the song. As they note: it’s taken on a life of its own.

It’s a funny thing. A lot of jazz standards came from then-contemporary entertainment: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart. And there hasn’t really been anything added to the canon in decades: probably “Birdland” was the last jazz song to really resonate with a lot of people. This puts “Tank!” in a curious spot: it’s popular, it’s being played a lot and it’s that rare jazz song that’s become known outside of jazz circles. Does it have what it takes to stick around and become a standard? I mean maybe. It’s a good melody, it can open up if you just stick to the theme, but its riffs seem tailor-made for performance by larger ensembles. It’s a perfect song for a high-school or jazz big band: at once dripping with an old-school cool but contemporary enough it doesn’t have to have dust blown off its charts.

Last year, Netflix released a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop. It got mixed reviews and was unceremoniously cancelled after ten episodes, less than one month after it debuted. The show wasn’t great - most live-action adaptations of anime shows aren’t - and at it’s best only seemed like a riff off the original show, but they did one thing right: they kept the theme song.