Dave Brubeck, Who Helped Put Jazz Back in Vogue, Dies at 91

For anime in this genre, the pace can be a bit slow at times. This series is definitely character driven, as opposed to being event driven (although there are of course events that drive the characters). Since it's a bit of a "coming of age" story the focus is more on their development, and it takes a few episodes for the anime to set the background for the story and its players before it starts "moving."

One way to appreciate this approach is to contrast the storytelling techniques of western comics vs Japanese manga in the 90s (as they have since borrowed a lot from each other). The book "Understanding Comics" explains how in a western comic book each frame, while containing art, typically contains a lot of text. The story in western comics at the time was very textually driven, with the art as an accompaniment to help illustrate (ha!) what occurred in the text.

In contrast, manga could spend pages on images where the only "text" would be textual sound effects, devoting much space to creating an ambiance or mood. Furthermore, dialog might be more sparse and short, with greater reliance upon illustrating emotion. In fact, one of the reasons that the stereotypical anime style of big heads / large eyes developed was because of the realization that it was an effective technique to wordlessly convey emotions in characters (although this style actually originated in a western comic, Betty Boop).

Sorry, my memory is a bit fuzzy as to how Understanding Comics explained this all, but if you consider this difference in approach to storytelling, you might better understand what "slice of life" anime are doing. The intent isn't necessarily to pull you into a series of events and "go somewhere" immediately.

That being said, I heartily recommend this series. I had always found jazz interesting, although it was a bit too esoteric for me to know where to start. This series introduces jazz through some songs that are very easy to get into, even though they have a lot of depth. The end result of this, for me, was that I ended up taking up the sax and loving it. :)

I used to listen to Time Out with my dad too, late at night with whiskey. So many good Brubeck memories...