The Music of Hey Arnold! Live!

The Music of Hey Arnold! Live! is a concert programme drawn from the score Jim Lang wrote for the animated television series Hey Arnold!. Music that was written to sit under dialogue is performed here as the main event, with the themes, the songs written for the series and the incidental cues treated as a single body of work.

Lang's writing for the series ran on jazz and drew in hip hop, blues, R&B and funk. That was an unusual palette for children's television, where scores tended toward synthesiser cues and light orchestral pastiche, and it gave the series a sound that did not resemble the programmes around it. The setting was an ordinary city block rather than a fantasy world, and the score took that seriously instead of writing down to its audience.

The result is a body of music that has outlasted the episodes it was made for, and one that introduced a generation of listeners to jazz by arriving in a form they were not looking for it in. Heard on its own, without the animation, it stands as writing rather than as accompaniment.