The Music of Hey Arnold Live! Feat. Jim Lang and The PS 118 AllStars

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Kids who grew up on that show were handed real jazz without anybody mentioning it. Upright bass, brushed drums, a muted trumpet over a city street - a children's cartoon quietly ran a bebop education for a generation that thought it was just the sound of the stoop. The man who wrote it is playing it live with a band, which reframes the whole thing: those were not cues, they were compositions, and hearing them performed by people in a room makes that obvious in about four bars. Bring whoever you watched it with, because the recognition hits in a way you cannot manufacture. A live band playing cartoon music to grown adults could easily be a gimmick, and the reason it is not is that the writing always stood up without the pictures. Seven on Wednesday on South Hill Street. Los Angeles has quietly become the place where this kind of live-score nostalgia show happens first, and there is usually another one on in the same month.