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.

As I watched The Queen’s Cartoonists slip and slide through decades of cartoon music in a matter of minutes, with the animations projected on a large screen behind them, I followed a captivated crowd of young and old consciously connect what they were watching with what they were hearing. The pleasure of the perfect synchrony of sound and pictures was instantly recognizable.

“Part of the point was to get people to go out and see jazz,” Pierson says. But it’s also about showing the profound impact cartoon music has had on everything from film scores to modern animations. Everything, from SpongeBob SquarePants to Bojack Horseman, has roots that go back to the golden age of animation. So Pierson and his band travel the United States dressed like John Travolta and Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, brewing up forgotten traditions with a mixture of merry melodies and prolific performances. They are on a mission to retrieve something from the past that seems to have been lost in our present – a sense of direction (should’ve turned left at Albuquerque!). 

The Queen’s Cartoonists is made up of six exceptional multi-instrumentalists. But don’t take my word for it – let Daniel Goldmark, a professor of music history and author of Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon, tell you instead – “the kind of stuff The Queen’s Cartoonists are doing is really hard,” he says. “You have to be really good musicians to do this.”

There’s Rossen Nedelchev, the drummer in the band. He was the person that introduced me to the music of The Queen’s Cartoonists, transporting me back to the late 20th century in Bulgaria when Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century zipped into my living room for the first time. Then there’s Larry Cook (bass), Drew Pitcher (tenor saxophone and flute), Mark Phillips (clarinet and a very old and rare curved soprano saxophone), Greg Hammontree (trumpet and foley magic), and, of course, Pierson (piano), the band leader, arranger, and composer.

“At the start, we just performed this cool swing music used in cartoons,” Pierson says. “Now the emphasis has changed to, ‘look at this cartoon and we’ll play the soundtrack.’ It’s become more visual.” While the projections are the most important aesthetic aspect of the show, Pierson admits they really try to put the looney in their tunes with each band member performing pretty complex circus numbers and tricks.

You’ve got Nedelchev’s lightsaber-inspired drum solo and Phillips’ “Sabre Dance“, where he impossibly plays a sax and a clarinet simultaneously. Pierson tends to make a cocktail (“shaken, not stirred”) while he plays the piano. Perhaps most impressively looney is Hammontree’s performance of the “William Tell Overture” which Pierson describes him doing while “balancing an apple on his head as he rides a clown bicycle and an audience member shoots nerf darts at him.”

The real alchemy of what The Queen’s Cartoonists do is that they entertain kids and adults by playing music and cartoons very few of us still appreciate today. Let’s be honest – jazz, just like classical music, is possibly not the most prevalent genre on our subway, road-trip, workout, and birthday playlists. Jazz, particularly contemporary jazz, with its emphasis on improvisation, is not exactly accessible to people of all ages. But older, stricter jazz, like Duke Ellington, breaks through and gets stuck in your head. That’s what Pierson wants to get out of every The Queen’s Cartoonists show – a connection with the audience, no matter where they are or how old they may be.

“Even the best jazz musicians today, like Chris Potter – I’d go see him and I’m like, ‘I’m a professional jazz musician, I’ve no idea what that was,’” says Pierson. But match the music with the cartoons – it just clicks. Literally – the ‘click track’ was developed during the earliest attempts to sync sound and pictures. The click track is a series of metronome beats, linked directly to the rhythm of the action onscreen, that the musicians follow to stay in sync. 

You can draw an even straighter line between contemporary cartoons and animated movies and the classic Warner Bros. productions. “The giants, like Pixar composer Michael Giacchino (Coco, Inside Out, The Incredibles), were all raised on those cartoons,” Goldmark says. Everything from Bojack Horseman to The Simpsons, which are basically animated sitcoms, have roots in the Silly Symphonies, Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes, and Happy Harmonies cartoons – yes, those guys back then really had a thing for alliteration and one-upping one another. What the first cartoons introduced and current animations continue to experiment with is ways in which you can emote through sound. 

These are stories that are heartfelt, as in the case of Pixar, or satirical, as in the case of Bojack, that just happen to be animated. “They don’t hire cartoon composers – they hire really, really solid composers,” Goldmark says. For Pierson, this is another sign that we’re coming back full circle. But the audience is only slowly warming up to the genius that cartoon music carries – “it’s music for something that’s animated, it doesn’t have to be a second or third-class citizen in the composing world,” Goldmark says.

Because what else would explain the bizarre phenomenon of a Bulgarian kid growing up in the 1990s whistling Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” in one breath and then “Oh! Susanna” in another? And it’s not just me – it’s what got Goldmark interested in the history of cartoon music in the first place. “It all started when I was five and I wanted to learn to play piano so I can perform this particular piece of music,” Goldmark says. “In college, I found out that I learned that piece from cartoon music. When I realized that, I had an epiphany that it wasn’t just that piece, but lots of classical, pop, folk songs – you name it.”

Stalling’s musical genius stemmed from his ability to find songs in the vast music library belonging to Warner Bros., match them to the storyline, and compose them according to the action. The music was not intended as a background – it is a primary and bold narrator, of sorts, in every cartoon. Like in the 1949 Road Runner classic, Fast and Furryous, where a high-speed chase around a cloverleaf interchange is timed perfectly to the song “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” – an intentional musical pun for those with a keen ear.

It’s reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino movie, where music is quintessential to the story, framing, and aesthetic. In a 2016 Variety interview, his music supervisor, Mary Ramos said, “what makes Quentin standout is his bold use of music. Often times it is a main character in his movies.” In films like Kill Bill: Vol. 1., that means a very Stalling-esque approach in terms of leaning on archival music. But, whereas Stalling relied on the vast Warner Bros. archive, allowing him to manipulate the melody from the published music to match his compositions, the contemporary world faces all kinds of copyright hurdles when it comes to music clearance. And Stalling could juggle dozens of melodies with different pace, genre, and origin to orchestrate the narrative of a six-minute cartoon.

Let’s compare that to the six-minute opening of Baby Driver, which is synced perfectly to the song “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a finished product adapted to match the onscreen action. But in Stalling’s time, you only had the ingredients because there were no recordings (remember, it’s the 1930s and 1940s) of the music he would use. “So, for example, Stalling would take a Raymond Scott song and mould it to any beat,” Goldmark says. “He could manipulate it to make it sound sad, happy, upbeat, downbeat, whatever he wanted – that’s the beauty of it.” 

Stalling would then record the music that Warner Bros. had the rights to with their 60-piece orchestra, scoring the cartoon out of order and in as many takes as it took to perfectly match it to the action. Then the composers and editors put the puzzle together. Not The Queen’s Cartoonists though – six musicians performing these complex, interchanging compositions in real time, as the cartoons play above their heads. And that’s just the performance. Pierson says he’s spent hundreds of hours in YouTube wormholes, public domain record vortices, speaking with musicologists (including Goldmark) to try and find cartoons and music that are not copyrighted and can be performed live. Pierson then works on the music – “that could mean directly transcribing it or finding another piece that could fit,” he says – and then arranging it.

That’s how Pierson worked out the Popeye and Bugs Bunny cartoons I saw performed. Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor and A Corny Concerto are both listed as public domain works, allowing The Queen’s Cartoonists to put their own spin on them. Pierson is particularly proud of their Popeye composition. “It’s mainly brand new arrangement,” he says. “Only 20% I recycled from an old Popeye chart, the rest I pulled from a new cartoon, and edited it all together.”

That’s the beauty of The Queen’s Cartoonists’ approach to cartoons and music – they are able to add yet another layer to the treasure trove that is cartoon music and make it work in the contemporary world. It’s also what distinguishes Pierson’s approach to the musical arrangement from earlier attempts to popularize Stalling’s work – like Bugs Bunny on Broadway and its sequel Bugs Bunny at the Symphony – which combine a live orchestra performing parts of the classical music score with large projections of Warner Bros. cartoons.

The shortcoming? It’s lower hanging fruit because it just regurgitates famous classical compositions used in cartoons. “It’s Rossini, it’s Wagner, it’s Brahms,” says Goldmark. “The orchestras know how to play that stuff.” The Queen’s Cartoonists take it a step further – and, as the band evolves, they are beginning to experiment with incorporating international and contemporary cartoons.

My Moon (see below for trailer) is the first time The Queen’s Cartoonists are premiering animated film – “which is super exciting,” Pierson says. My Moon is a beautifully animated eight-minute digital film, “a very colorful experience about the relationship between the Earth, Moon, and Sun,” Pierson explains. “We adapted the original score written by a German composer and the guys who did the film are super excited about us performing it live.”

With the addition of this contemporary animation, The Queen’s Cartoonists create an impressive audio and visual genealogy of cartoon music, linking the first experimentations nearly a century ago – when the ingenious art of timing cartoons according to a bar sheet of music was developed – to modern animation timings where synchronicity is a software issue. 

When I was in New York to interview The Queen’s Cartoonists, it seemed like I was bombarded by music everywhere I went – a swing band at the JFK AirTrain exit; soul on McDougal Street; gospel on a street corner; Frank Sinatra in a restaurant. Even the sound of the subway has a certain jazzy rhythm to its predetermined chaos. “Jazz is America’s great contribution to the arts,” Pierson says. “We just want to make people aware that it’s all around them – from cartoon music to the sound swings of everyday life.”

The problem for Pierson today is that music is not composed – it’s produced. Especially cartoon music – looking at you, ‘Baby Shark’ people. Back in the day, Warner Bros. could hire a 60-string band to score a Bogart picture and ask some of the musicians to then stay back and score a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “You can’t expect Netflix to be hiring orchestras to record things,” Pierson says. “Even Game of Thrones, big shows like that – it’s just a guy behind a computer.”

A copy of a bar sheet synching sound and picture for the first two scenes in the early ‘Merrie Melodies’ cartoon ‘Shuffle Off To Buffalo.’

AnimationResources.org

Does it frustrate him? Pierson shakes his head to say, “no,” but Nedelchev chimes in to say, “of course it does!” It’s because people can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s artificial nowadays – “when we play kids something from the 60s, they love it,” Nedelchev says.

“The sound isn’t perfect, the pitch isn’t perfect, it’s messy – but it’s real. They hear it organically.” And that’s what makes The Queen’s Cartoonists special – especially if you get to see them live. By going back to basics with cartoon music, they are bringing back an entire era from the depths of the dusty and forgotten. And they do it with a certain theatrical pizzazz that gets kids and adults totally hooked.

“What’s next?” I asked Pierson. “Carnegie Hall, here we come!” So, as it stands, that’s not all, folks because The Queen’s Cartoonists are just getting started. 

• Story and videos by

  Nikolay Nikolov

• Edited by

  Sam Haysom

• Artwork by

  Bob Al-Greene