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

That shows a substantial number of votes have expressed disapproval of the post.

Does his insinuation really deserve the treatment?

Couldn't the disapproving parties have elaborated on their castigation?

If the disagreement is about the facts, then why not state so and corroborate with those facts?

Cavalier down-voting is the cheapest form of expression and belongs on lesser forums. Not on HN. Use it sparingly.

Present your case, instead.

http://www.pbs.org/brubeck/theMan/cowboyToJazzman.htm

Japan (or to some degrees, Korea, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) has been influenced by Confucianism. How to deal with shame is a central part in social life. This includes dealing with feelings of alienation to one's social counterparts. And "being wimpy" is kind of shame experiences for teenagers in those countries.

You need to understand "shame" and "guilt" are two different concepts. "Guilt" is based on actions and morality. "Shame" is based on attributes that one possess. That's why you can see a lot of murders in East Asian's dramas having no feelings for guilt, but having feelings of shame.

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. :)

   Have you got a steady boyfriend
   'Cause honey I've been watching you
   I hear you're mad about Brubeck
   I like your eyes, I like him too
   He's an artist, a pioneer
   We've got to have some music on the new frontier.

Bebop didn't really take over until the post war years.