British movie composer James Everingham remembers the very first thing he reached for when he felt uncertain a couple of cue for Chief of War. “The touchstone was always traditional Hawaiian music,” he says. “The rhythms, the way we used vocals, the way the melodies were shaped… that was our starting point and something we returned to again and again.”
The Apple TV collection, co-scored with Hans Zimmer, referred to as for music with cinematic sweep and cultural immersion. Across 9 episodes, Jason Momoa’s Ka‘iana travels from island politics to ocean battles to personal reckonings. “You’ve received Jason Momoa because the lead, and it isn’t simply set in Hawaii,” James explains. “You’ve got the politics of the chiefs, these huge battles, romance — so many elements that need to be scored in a cinematic way, because this is ultimately entertainment. But Hawaiian musical culture had to be at the core of everything we wrote.”
Part of that meant understanding when to steer and when to step again. Much of Chief of War is carried out in Ōlelo Hawai‘i, the island’s critically endangered indigenous language, whose cadence and melody typically really feel inherently musical. “If you place conventional Hawaiian music — sung in ʻŌlelo Hawai‘i — over dialogue in that language, it can be quite challenging,” James explains. Scene by scene, the team would decide whether to let Hawaiian vocals drive the score or to keep them atmospheric, allowing the dialogue to breathe. That could mean percussion, lyricless vocals, or the Hawaiian nose flute in place of sung lyrics.
A nonetheless from ‘Chief of War’
| Photo Credit:
Apple TV
Key to this was collaboration with Grammy-nominated Hawaiian singer Kamaka Iwa Kanakaole, who wrote lyrics that integrated the occasions unfolding on display screen. “Instead of just the vowels you usually might get in cinematic vocals, you can make out this real emotion in her voice, and it’s inherently tied to what’s happening,” James says.
In his toolkit of sounds had been devices few outdoors Hawaii have heard: the oeoe (pronounced “oi oi”), a hollowed-out gourd swung overhead to create a ghostly whistle; the pahu, a shark-skin drum; the puniu, a smaller knee-strapped drum utilized in hula; the kaʻekeʻeke, a bamboo idiophone with a tonal thud. Notably absent was the ukulele. “The ukulele is not from the Kingdom of Hawaii. It came later with the annexation. We tried to avoid the tropes,” he says.
If Chief of War broadened James’ musical vocabulary, it additionally reshaped his artistic course of. “I had to make a very conscious effort to keep things loose enough that when I go to Hawaii, when I meet these incredible artists, there’s space for that to come into the music,” he says. “Some people who know a lot more than I do about traditional Hawaiian music are going to put their stamp on it and take it to a whole other level.”
That model of openness matches nicely alongside Hans Zimmer. The two have labored collectively on a number of tasks, however James nonetheless notes moments that remind him why Zimmer is, nicely… Hans Zimmer. “He’s so great at understanding the core of the story, putting aside all the flashy things that might be on screen and really diving into the core themes and the identity of whatever project it might be,” he says. “For Chief of War, there are these themes of identity, belonging and cultural significance. And Hans is excellent at dialling into that.”
Zimmer additionally pushed him to step outdoors his consolation zone. “Sometimes when you’re co-scoring a project with someone, it’s easy to gravitate towards the scenes that come naturally,” James says. “Something I found surprising is actually the value in doing something that doesn’t come naturally… maybe figuring that out yields a more unexpected result.”
Their work on Chief of War comes after a curious overlap of their histories with one of the world’s nice devices. In 2020, with the Royal Albert Hall shuttered for the primary time in additional than a century, James led a small crew to seize the voice of its 9,999-pipe organ for a digital instrument library. “It was really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says. “For the first time since it opened in the 1800s, it was empty and available.” Microphones had been positioned throughout the empty auditorium, a binaural pair within the Royal Box to catch the air and resonance because it swelled by the house.
Around that very same quiet stretch of months, organist Anna Lapwood was additionally enjoying it beneath particular entry, respiratory new life into the instrument most frequently heard at packed galas. There could be an odd poetry in understanding Zimmer’s rating for Interstellar, so outlined by its personal cathedral organ, by no means discovered its technique to the Royal Albert Hall. “You probably have to put it down to access. It’s booked out every single day for major performances,” he says. And but right here was James, digitising a sound that Zimmer himself might need as soon as chosen to craft one of essentially the most iconic authentic scores of the twenty first century, had timing and fortune aligned.
James says that his path to tasks like these wasn’t born of a single cinematic epiphany. “A lot of people have that moment with John Williams,” he says. “For me, it was the classical music I was exposed to as a child — Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler. Rachmaninoff was just constantly playing in the house.” At seventeen, he recorded his first feature-length rating at Abbey Road Studios. Within just a few years, he was scoring Amazon’s Grand Prix Driver and working with artists like AURORA on the BBC’s Frozen Planet II.
Now primarily based in Los Angeles, James has constructed a portfolio spanning tv, documentaries, and business work, alongside producing pattern libraries like Woodchester Piano and Fractured Strings. His newest characteristic work was on Paul Schrader’s 2024 documentary The Blue Angels, a chronicle of the United States Navy’s flight demonstration squadron — the identical outfit that famously impressed the fighter-pilot swagger of Top Gun. It’s a neat twist of destiny that Zimmer additionally helped rating Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 authentic.
James Everingham
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
F1 director Joseph Kosinski directed Maverick, and James cites him as a dream collaborator for his skill to keep up high-entertainment worth with grounded realism. He additionally names Scott, who directed the unique Top Gun, as a formative affect. “Many directors are influenced by him,” James says, “and maybe one day that legacy will live on in someone else I get to work with.”
For now, James stands as a convergence of these many serendipitous threads. Chief of War appears to have distilled one thing important concerning the work he desires to maintain doing. “A lot of the time, film music is a puzzle,” he says. “It’s a continuous discovery of what the musical world is for the project… and ideally something that hasn’t really been heard before.”
Chief of War is at the moment streaming on Apple TV
Published – August 12, 2025 12:59 pm IST
