The Music of Hey Arnold ft: Jim Lang & The PS 118 AllStars

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You did not know you were being taught what jazz sounded like. You were nine, it was after school, and the show about the kid with the football head had a soundtrack of walking bass and muted trumpet that nobody explained to you because it did not need explaining. Then you grew up and heard a Blue Note record and felt an odd familiarity you could not place. The composer who did that to you is playing this room, with a live combo, running the cues as actual arrangements rather than nostalgia snippets — the boarding house theme, the stoop music, the sad ones. He wrote them with real players in the room in the nineties, which is why they hold up as music instead of as a bit. The venue is an hour and change past the wind farms, a saloon in the high desert where the stage is small and people stand on the patio between sets under a sky with actual stars in it. Music at 9:00 PM in Pioneertown. Bring a jacket — the desert drops hard after dark, and everybody who has been here before knows it.