JJ Abrams Collaborated With Hamilton Composer Lin-Manuel Miranda to Score New

Incredibly, this whole situation happened because Miranda is a huge Star Wars fan and Abrams is a huge Lin-Manuel Miranda fan, so it sounds like the collaboration was a delightful love-fest from beginning to end.

While British readers might not be too familiar with the name, in the US Miranda is known for writing the acclaimed Broadway musical Hamilton, based on the life of US founding father Alexander Hamilton.

There’s a twist in store, however: rather than using John Williams’s Forties-influenced jazz (deliberately distorted by the composer to give it an “alien” feel), the scene will feature brand new music. At the show Miranda came up to him and told him if he needed music for the cantina he can contact Miranda.

What Miranda didn’t know was that Abrams really did need music for the cantina scene he has in the movie, as the legendary composer on the film, John Williams, focused more on the film’s score. Abrams revealed one of them to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show on November 30, saying there will be a scene much like the famed Cantina sequence in the original.

“He’s like, ‘I’ll drop everything…!’ He and I were sending back and forth music files and he’s singing and playing instruments”.

Miranda confirmed the news on his own, very active twitter feed. And he’s worked on the new Star Wars. This is just one of the many ways that The Force Awakens is staying true to the stylistic roots of the franchise, and I can’t wait to see how it all comes together on December 18. And he won an Emmy for music he wrote for the Tony award show in 2014.