The day Joel Pierson, also known as the ‘piano doctor,’ moved to New York in 2014 was the day his wife told him she was pregnant (Yipe!). Pierson, a jazz musician, who was out of work and out of the music scene, resorted to a list of “harebrained ideas” he had been carefully compiling, for a fresh musical start. It was that or a different career altogether.

“As I was running through the list, I was like, ‘a jazz band playing cartoon music, who’s done that,’” Pierson told me as we sat around a secluded (vewy, vewy quiet) table at the New York Hilton Midtown, where his band, The Queen’s Cartoonists, were about to showcase some of their repertoire – ranging from renditions of early Popeye and Looney Tunes to cult classics like Bambi Meets Godzilla – at an Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) conference.