SEATBELTS

Seatbelts was the brainchild of prolific Japanese composer, performer, and arranger Yoko Kanno, a band put together to record the soundtrack for the 1998 Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop. Created by Kanno, who had been a successful soundtrack composer since the mid-’80s, working on video games, anime series, and movies, Seatbelts were put together to record the soundtrack for the Shinichirō Watanabe-helmed anime series Cowboy Bebop, mixing jazz, blues, and rock. Debuting on Japanese television in 1998, the show was aired worldwide, with the series earned praise not only for its style but for Kanno’s more unusual take on the soundtrack, with most anime series of the time using generic J-pop as their backing tracks. Alongside the show, Seatbelts issued three albums from the series between 1998 and 1999 before releasing the 2001 soundtrack albums Ask DNA and Future Blues from Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. The collection Cowboy Bebop Tank! THE! BEST! arrived in 2004, bringing together some previously released material with three tracks from the video game Cowboy Bebop: Tsuioku no Serenade. Although the series and the band ended, Kanno continued composing for numerous anime series, video games, and movies before rekindling Seatbelts in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Getting together virtually, they re-recorded the show’s closing theme, “The Real Folk Blues,” to raise money for charity, while Milan Records also reissued the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack in a deluxe vinyl package. In 2024, the collection of Cowboy Bebop’s chilled-out music Songs for the Cosmic Sofa entered the Top 20 of the U.S. Jazz Albums chart. ~ Rich Wilson