When Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad first signed on to score Netflix’s Luke Cage,
they didn’t consider how the show would consume their day-to-day lives.
The two are legendary — Muhammad was a founding member of A Tribe
Called Quest, and the prolific Younge has an output that defies
categorization.
They quickly realized all future plans needed to be shelved. It
wasn’t solely that the score was overly consuming — though Younge
concedes, “We had to give up our lives as artists to dedicate ourselves
wholly to this score” — but more that Younge and Muhammad realized they
had a chance to create a score that could define the TV series.
“We raised the bar and created something that is timeless,” professes
Muhammad. Over coffee at the Cut restaurant in the recently opened Four
Seasons Downtown in New York City, Vulture spoke with the two musicians
about creating the score, the lack of opportunities for black
composers, and setting a tone that bridges a many musical genres.
Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Since about 2013, when he was working on the Souls of Mischief
record, and he asked me to be a part of it. That formed our friendship
and production partnership, but we had never spoken about scoring
together, so when [showrunner] Cheo [Hodari Coker] reached out to us
individually, it was easy to fall into.
For something like this, are you both in the same room working
together? Are you emailing? And then how do you get the orchestra
involved?
Adrian Younge: There are 13 episodes, and on
each of the episodes, we have a spotting session, where we meet with the
directors and the music supervisors, and we all watch the episode. Then
we write notes and we leave. Ali takes these amount of cues, I take
these amount of cues, we do a certain amount of cues together, and when
we are done, we submit it for approval to everybody, and assuming there
are no changes — there are never much changes at all — we give it Miguel
Atwood-Ferguson, who is our conductor-orchestrator, and he orchestrates
it for a 30-piece orchestra that we record in Raphael Saadiq’s studio.
Then we record that and mix it.
There is a sense that you both realized this score would be
studied by future musicians, and the idea that you had to go above and
beyond expectations. Am I right in that? And did that sense come while
scoring or after the fact?
AY: It was in the present. As
freelance artists, you do what the hell you want to. When you are a
composer for a multi-billion-dollar company like Marvel, you are an
employee and you have responsibilities. When we accepted these jobs, I
just thought it’d be a couple of months. We realized this is a big deal
for many reasons, at that point.
One reason, we enjoyed it, and we wanted to do a good job for Cheo,
who has our back. Secondly, it is something that is great for our
careers. As composers, it brings us to another side where cats have done
hip-hop, R&B, and now we’re getting into a big television series
with a film perspective on composition, not just a regular television.
And lastly, we needed to execute because it was something that was
bigger than us. We are two black composers, and black composers don’t
really get the opportunities to support things of this magnitude. It is a
cyclical process. If you look back to Duke Ellington, to Quincy Jones,
to Isaac Hayes, these opportunities are seldom, and when black composers
have been awarded these opportunities, it is something where you must
make a statement. The statement we sought to make is that people of our
culture should aspire to do more than just sampling or producing for
someone else. Don’t just stop there. You can score film, you can have an
orchestra, you can go as far as you want to.
When I say our culture, I am talking about urban culture. And that
includes people that are in hip-hop. You don’t see hip-hop producers
composing. We can count on one hand how many we know. It is unfortunate.
But it is something that ties into the fact that you don’t see many
black composers having these opportunities. We knew we wanted to set a
bar, and we wanted to make something pivotal, unique, and novel for
people to watch and feel.
Retweeted
By Fluorescent Beige (@tlw83)
Retweeted
By Fluorescent Beige (@tlw83)
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