The TV show he’s talking about scoring isn’t—as you might expect from the reference to the seminal, skronky, and sort-of-really-quite-difficult jazz collective —a head-hurting avant-garde exercise in the fashion of Twin Peaks: The Return, or Ibiza Weekender, but Hey Arnold!, the downbeat Nickelodeon animated series that charted the often dismal and occasionally troubling lives of an oddly-proportioned trio of pre-pubescents who mooned around the fictional city of Hillwood.

“I remember, as we got onto the second or third series, thinking ‘I'm going to get as weird as I possibly can'," says composer Jim Lang, talking down the line from his house just north of San Francisco. "'I'm going to get some post-bebop Art Ensemble of Chicago weirdness into this.’ That was really fun – working with that freedom."

Whether or not Lang managed to convince any of his audience to cough up some of their not-so hard-earned pocket money on records like Les Stances a Sophie, Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City, or A Jackson in Your House is neither here nor there. What he did do, over the course of five seasons of television and two movies—the second of which was the warmly-received 2017 release _Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie—_is subtly introduce a generation of E number-addled children to jazz as an idea, jazz as a texture, jazz as a thing that exists and can be heard, felt, and embraced, even when all you’re really doing is swinging your size three feet off the edge of a sofa, eating Smarties and trying to ignore the funny feeling that does backwards somersaults in the pit of your stomach every time Helga Pataki appears on screen.

The cartoons we watch as children follow us into both adolescence and adulthood like benign giants of an inner landscape, and they do so because they arrive at a point in our lives where our capacity for innocence is matched only by that of the possibility of osmosis. The child is a sponge. That sponge will eventually find itself irradiated by hormones, as puberty chucks an obsidian bowling ball down the alley of the self and it all goes to hell. But before that, and after the swaddled infantility of infancy itself, there’s a sweet spot where the world of stimulation is all there is. And it is in that sweet spot that cartoons really matter.