Reputation is a big part of Cowboy Bebop, it has significant stature. But if you ask people to describe it, to differentiate it from the pack, sooner or later they’ll get round to the music. The use of jazz as a soundtrack, and in the legendary OP, is something pretty peculiar in a non-continuous action comedy.
The show thus shares space with the audiences’ response to jazz as a genre. Which is a pretty complicated area - encompassing popular music from the interwar years, musically complex improvisatory music, and baffling avant-garde stuff within a single genre label. I don’t have any kind of musical education, but I think it’s fair to say that the common features of jazz music constitute a unique language. Cowboy Bebop incorporates both the music itself and our perception of it. The historical evocations are as important as the sounds.
The impact of the idea of jazz on the show is partly a function of cultural distance (taking jazz as an American form) and partly a historical one (jazz being associated with the periods of its greatest popularity and creative dynamism). Merely using the instruments of a jazz band, their tone, adds an atmospheric veneer to a show which is, after all, steeped in urban American culture.
I think it’s worth comparing the music actually featured in Cowboy Bebop to the jazz music described by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was closer to the culture of the music, knew many players, and importantly wanted to achieve in his written style something of the rhythm and flow of the music. In Cowboy Bebop the music itself is featured, but often is rather worn on top of the action. The show isn’t jazzy in the way Kerouac is.
That’s a fairly difficult assertion for me to substantiate. What I mean is that the pacing of the program, the action, the art, isn’t aesthetically unified in that direction. Cowboy Bebop is a composite of genre games, different musical styles, parallels with the contemporary as well as history and fiction. I’m treating the series as a whole here. That ignores the fact that individual episodes often have perfectly managed internal coherency in their design. But the result of this over 2 seasons is a sort of, frankly unmusical, collage effect.
The major problem here is in the idea that a TV show can realistically mirror a musical approach. By which I mean to say, any show can reference the culture around a music, its associations for us, but conjuring up those associations is not the only thing that the music would do for us. In fact to accurately mirror the effect of a sort of music in a completely different medium would require a distinct radicalism. Kerouac’s attempt a a “jazzy” writing is a prime example. It involves breaking the grain of the medium.
Cowboy Bebop doesn’t do that, it doesn’t even try. It is, aside from being (as far as I’m concerned) an absurdly immaculate and beautiful program, as much in love with the TV show as the jazz band. The games played in Cowboy Bebop reject the possibility of a mimicry of a musical form. The appropriation of context is as important as the occasions on which Cowboy Bebop actually does move like a jazz song.
Again, I think this comes down to distance, because the space between the USA and Japan is so central to the show. It’s in love with America, attempting to absorb it into a created future. Not the globalising brand-name behemoth, but the cultures of America. When Cowboy Bebop uses jazz the fact is that it uses it, it doesn’t want to be it.
Frankly I don’t think that the jazz element in the show is any more important to it than the genre games, the sci-fi, the American history. It’s something fairly unique in anime, and (thanks to the OP), striking to the viewer. But I don’t think Cowboy Bebop is “the jazz anime”, I think of it as a lovesong for 20th century America, which includes jazz. Except Cowboy Bebop isn’t very songlike, it’s discontinuous, a delirious collage of effects. Each show a weekly slice of madness. When the press release claims the show is “a new style in itself” I think that’s what it means. It is, at the end of the day, a style peculiar to television - not an attempt at music-style TV.
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too. So perhaps jazz is not political in terms of race anymore, but in terms of socioeconomic class. You need the instruments, the expensive education and whatnot, the sheer amount of time to practice that isn’t available to the working class (I’m probably wrong about this), and so jazz is becoming the esoteric, alienated, elitist art (this was already happening in the 60’s, though) reserved for a certain peoples. 
and they play Affirmation, made famous (at least in my interpretation of it) by George Benson but originally composed by Jose Feliciano. So while we say “jazz” this and “jazz” that, we are homogenizing that very notion and perhaps overlooking the layers and contradictions within this art.
