Right on Cue

John Williams' score for the Star Wars films numbers among the most iconic, well-recognized soundtracks in pop culture history. But as the universe expands from the films into spinoffs, animated series, live-action shows, and a host of other media, other composers have had to take up the baton and translate the bombastic space opera sounds Williams developed for other corners of a galaxy far, far away.

No one's done it longer (or more voluminously) than Kevin Kiner, who's spent nearly fifteen years scoring the myriad CG animated series set in the Star Wars universe. He's scored The Clone Wars from its original theatrical film all the way to 2018's The Final Season, for which he's currently nominated for an Annie for Outstanding Achievement for Music in an Animated Television/Media Production. He also scored all four seasons of Star Wars Rebels and is currently working on the first season of Clone Wars spinoff The Bad Batch.

A thirty-plus-year veteran of film and TV scoring, Kiner's a chameleon who can work with the themes and motifs set by other composers and spin them into broader, more dynamic cues demanded by the rigors of television storytelling. That's borne out in his work for Star Wars, especially, where at this point he's written more music for the universe than John Williams himself -- while he finds moments to work in familiar motifs and themes, Kiner also carves out room for experimentation, which you can hear in the more synth-heavy scoring for Clone Wars: The Final Season.

The Spool sat down with Kiner for a nice, long chat about his long composing career, the challenges of finding creative new ways to spin the most familiar film music in history, and the joys of composing with his sons Dean and Sean Kiner.

Decades before Black Panther, Eddie Murphy gave us the first real glimpse of a fictional pan-African paradise with the country of Zamunda in John Landis' 1988 classic Coming to America, in which Murphy played the naive Prince Akeem finding love and playing fish out of water in the concrete jungle of Queens. More than thirty years later, Dolemite Is My Name director Craig Brewer brings us back to Zamunda with Coming 2 America, as now-King Akeem tries to figure out the future of Zamunda with the arrival of an illegitimate son from America (played by Jermaine Fowler).

Unlike the first, which mostly took place in the fish out of water antics of Akeem in America, Coming 2 America lets us swim in the lush, vibrant world of Zamunda for much of its runtime, especially Ruth E. Carter's incredible costumes and Jefferson Sage's production design. Also playing a vital part is the score by Jermaine Stegall, who mixes traditional comedy scoring with a pan-African sound that evokes, but differentiates itself from, the theatrical bombast of the sound of Black Panther. Not only that, he spent weeks on set working with the choreographers and artists like Gladys Knight to help stage some of the dances and song performances that flesh out Zamunda's cultural fabric.

I sat down with Stegall for a long, invigorating chat about searching for the sound of Zamunda, Stegall's reflections on the long mentorships with legendary composers that led to this moment, and the need for more opportunities for Black composers in the industry.

"White lesbian films set in the past" is a budding subgenre in the last few years, stretching from The Favourite to Portrait of a Lady on Fire to last year's Ammonite (which we've covered on this very same show). But there's something intriguing about the latest entry in this rapidly-expanding field, Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, a 19th-century queer drama set on a quiet homestead in the rural areas of upstate New York. Abigail (Katherine Waterston), a pensive woman in a frigid marriage with her overworked farmer husband (Casey Affleck), finds an enticing escape from the doldrums and rhythms of farm life in the flirtations of Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), who herself needs a respite from her abusive husband played by Christopher Abbott.

The World to Come styles itself as a tome of poetic yearning, from its muted, distanced presentation to the lyrical voiceover of Waterston reciting her florid journals she writes to pass the days and chronicle her feelings. Together, the two find freedom and joy, however, fleeting, amongst the grief and isolation of their circumstances, and the results are as gorgeous as they are tragic.

Befitting the moodiness of the presentation is a similarly idiosyncratic score courtesy of musician and visual artist Daniel Blumberg, who makes his feature-film composing debut. An alumnus of London's free-jazz and experimental venue Cafe Oto, Blumberg leverages his love for improvisation and atmosphere into a fragile soundtrack that's foreboding and romantic in equal measure. Clarinets and strings fill the foggy New York air and the loaded silences between Abigail and Tallie, aided capably by fellow musicians like saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and vocalist Josephine Foster.

We sat down with Blumberg to talk about how he came to score The World to Come, working with many of his experimental contemporaries, and the extent to which his work as a visual artist overlaps with his composing work.

In a post-Endgame world, it's no surprise that brothers Joe and Anthony Russo are taking a step back from multi-billion-dollar superhero tentpoles into slightly smaller, grittier territory. Their latest, Cherry, based on the semiautobiographical novel by Nico Walker, certainly achieves that, though with no small amount of style. As the latest component of Tom Holland's post-Spidey career pivot to a Serious Adult Actor, Cherry casts him in the titular role of Cherry, a cynical Army vet who comes home from the hells of the Iraq war to succumb to opioid addiction (along with his waifish wife Emily, played by Ciara Bravo), turning to bank-robbing to fund their habit. Along the way, the Russos treat us to a jaundiced, blackly-comic version of Cherry's worldview, from his idiot friends to the myopic military leaders and soldiers he meets in his time in the service. And at the core of it all is Holland, leveraging some of that quirky Peter Parker energy to the role of a manic kid with nothing to lose. Undergirding the Russos' jaundiced style here, hitting somewhere between Stanley Kubrick and Harmony Korine, is the off-kilter, experimental score courtesy of Henry Jackman. He's spent the last decade or so scoring one blockbuster after another, an acolyte of Hans Zimmer's school who's scored everything from X-Men First Class to Captain Americas 2 and 3, where he first worked with the Russos. Cherry gives him the chance to try out a bunch of new, weird toys, including some whose provenance is unknown even to him, as you'll hear. The results are fascinatingly disorienting and tongue-in-cheek, which perfectly fits the overwhelming disconnect of Cherry's worldview. I sat down with Jackman to talk about working with the Russos as they transition out of superhero work, and the vast array of musical techniques and instruments he employed in his freewheeling experimentations with Cherry's score.

One of the most talked-about films of last year is Lee Isaac Chung's Minari, a scintillating, layered tale of a Korean-American family trying to chase the American Dream that's racking up awards nominations all over the place -- though admittedly, strangely in Best Foreign Film categories even though the film features American characters in an American setting.

It's a highly personal film for writer/director Chung, who based a lot of it on his own upbringing growing up in rural America to Korean-American immigrant parents, and the strange liminal state he experienced there. In the film itself, that's borne out in not just Chung's direction, but its pitch-perfect cast, including Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, and Youn Yuh-jung.

But one of the film's most unexpected pleasures is its delicate, airy score, courtesy of composer (and friend of the show) Emile Mosseri. Ever since his breakout a couple of years back with The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Mosseri has forged a mighty body of introspective scores that crackle at the edges of his film's gentle psychologies.

The last time we spoke, we talked to Mosseri about hopping onto the second season of Amazon's podcast adaptation Homecoming to play off the first season's paranoia-film needledrops. Here, he's in much gentler mode, sotto voce vocals pairing with gentle pianos and woodwinds to dance around Minari's struggling family unit with all the curiosity of a childhood memory.

I got the chance to talk to Mosseri about the score and the film itself, both of which dropped on Friday. Plus, keep an ear out for an exclusive performance of a cue from the film's soundtrack, "Jacob's Prayer."

At its heart, Ben Hozie's tingly, complicated Internet drama PVT CHAT (read our review here) is about connection or our lack thereof -- even as it's disguised as a lurid De Palma-esque thriller about a lonely young man named Jack (Peter Vack) who finds himself enamored with his favorite online dominatrix, Scarlet (Julia Fox, keeping up her New York bona fides after her big breakout in the Safdie Brothers' Uncut Gems). He's an insecure, pathological liar convinced that all human interactions are transactional; she's a cam girl who traffics in those very same transactions but occasionally lets her guard down when it comes to Jack. The two need each other in some ineffable way, even as the intricacies of their relationship aren't quite like the typical love story.

And indeed, there's something of the Safdies' loose, improvisational energy in PVT CHAT, NYC musician and filmmaker Hozie taking a fly-by-night documentary approach to Jack and Scarlet's deeply unconventional romance, one which gets them in as much trouble as it flirts with the struggle to find personal fulfillment.

Anchoring Hozie's curious mix of screwball romantic comedy and post-modern 21st century Internet age treatise is the minimalist, experimental score by music producer (and friend of Hozie) Austin Brown of Parquet Courts. The score is sparsely threaded throughout the film's modest 88-minute run time, but where it lands it has an impact: yearning guitars layer over Scarlet and Jack's more intimate moments, while Carpenter-esque synths punctuate the moments where their dynamic most threatens to crack.

This week, I sit down with Austin about crafting the sparse score for the film, the times when the first-time composer wanted to go big, and the family affair of NYC's indie music scene coming together to create a feature film.

Listen to our podcast interview with Austin, and listen to the PVT CHAT soundtrack on Austin's Bandcamp page here.

Spend any amount of time in Film Twitter circles anytime in the last six months, and someone's bound to bring up one of the most resplendent musical moments in the hell-year that was 2020: ten minutes in Steve McQueen's groovy tone poem Lovers Rock. Two-thirds of the way through the film, the packed floor of a London house party in the 1980s slow dances to Janey Kay's delicate, flirtatious "Silly Games". They're so lost in the rhythms and gyrations that, even after the song fades out, the collective erupts with Kay's sumptuous lyrics, everyone singing together to keep the song going just a little bit longer.

Those moments and more are some of the most vital components to the success of Small Axe, McQueen's five-film anthology about the lives of West Indian immigrant communities in England through the '60s, '70s, and '80s, humming and swaying with the reggae, disco, and rocksteady music that so infused themselves in those disparate neighborhoods. Whether it's the sweet sounds of the titular genre in the nearly-wordless Lovers Rock, or the Brixton-set underground protest music that feeds Alex Wheatle, or the top-40 R&B hits playing at the titular Mangrove Inn in Mangrove, Small Axe is little without the soundtrack that underpins all of its period authenticity and riveting snapshots of Black joy and solidarity in the face of racism and systemic oppression.

Key to that process was music supervisor Ed Bailie, who sat down with me for the podcast to talk about the challenges of scoring for five different movies, finding the balance between crate-digging for obscure tracks and playing the hits, and working with collaborators to find just the right sound for McQueen's disparate stories. And along the way, we also touch on being cognizant of one's role as a white creative among Black collaborators telling Black stories.

Even before the pandemic, before we couldn't leave our homes anymore, nature docs were my happy place. But luckily, the Sir David Attenborough Industrial Complex continues apace with BBC One's A Perfect Planet, which just started airing on Discovery Channel's new streaming service, Discovery+. This five-part series explores the planet on which we live, the natural forces that maintain our fragile ecosystems, and the life that lives on it: volcanoes, oceans, sunlight, and so on.

If you've seen these kinds of shows, you know not just Attenborough's reedy, authoritative narration, but the big, bombastic scores that tend to accompany it. But for Ilan Eshkeri, for whom Perfect Planet is his fourth round at scoring an Attenborough-narrated nature doc series, he wanted it to sound a bit different. And that he does; the bigness and sweep are still there, but tempered by more muted, atmospheric orchestrations and the introduction of pop elements like guitars and drums. And the title track, "A Perfect Planet," makes wonderful use of several children's choirs to illustrate the fragility and innocence of the Earth, and the generations we'll be leaving the planet to after we're gone -- an even greater reminder of the need to take direct action on climate change.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Eshkeri, who's scored everything from Stardust to Ghosts of Tsushima, to talk about his motivations behind the project, how his own environmentalism fuels his scoring, and more.

Awards season is upon us, which means all the studios and streaming services are breaking out their big guns. Luckily, one of the best films of the year comes to Netflix this weekend. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, based on the play by August Wilson and starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his final role. A fictionalized snapshot in the life of the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey, George C. Wolfe's film imagines her in a sweaty, muggy Chicago recording studio in the 1920s, trying to record her most popular singles for white Northern audiences, far from her comfortable Black Southern crowds. Of course, tensions rise over everything from artistic freedom, racial animus, and Coca-Cola. And all the while, Ma's trumpeter Levee, played by Boseman, tries to take advantage of their opportunity to stake his own ambitious claim in the music world. It's a vibrant adaptation of a riveting play, filled with staggering performances from Davis, Boseman, Colman Domingo, and the rest of the ensemble. And it tells a story about Black culture's impact on popular culture, and those artists' attempts to secure their own legacy in the face of a white world that wants to repackage it for their own consumption. The blues thrums at the heart of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, so it makes sense that Wolfe would tap jazz legend Branford Marsalis to pen the score. Not only does he punctuate vital moments with a burst of vivid jazz orchestration to throw us into Chicago in the Roaring '20s, he was also responsible for arranging every song you see and hear on screen. Luckily, I got the chance to talk to Marsalis, who's spent decades as one of the genre's foremost saxophonists and bandleaders. He spent three years as the head of the Tonight Show band for Jay Leno, and he's got plenty of stories to share both in and out of the story of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Sometimes, less is more -- where some composers might look at Francis Lee's sumptuous queer romance Ammonite, with its period detail and bodies crashing against each other like waves against the rocky shores of England, and go for maximalism, Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann (who also plays under the moniker Hauschka) are kings of restraint. That's an important quality to have, especially in something as transcendently dreamlike and wordless as Lee's latest film.

Throughout Lee's delicate, brittle exploration of class, history, and queerness, the composer duo leans hard on simple, sparse counterpoints, pianos, and strings threatening to burst into the foreground but always holding back. It's a work of remarkable minimalism, existing in conversation with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan's beautifully layered performances.

It's not the first time the two have worked together, having met to build the score for 2016's Lion and working on several projects since. Together, they've built a clear sense of collaboration which bears out in Ammonite's intimate, complicated scoring -- which echoes the growing intimacy between Winslet and Ronan as, respectively, 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and a young woman she's tasked to care for.

In the wake of Ammonite's arrival on VOD and select theaters, both O'Halloran and Hauschka stop by the podcast to talk about the way their collaboration has developed, the way their own sense of minimalism dovetails with Lee's, and the importance of score as a means to build texture and sound design.