I got connected with this artist, Baaba Maal, and traveled around with him while he was on tour. After, I was able to get into a studio and just record amazing musicians for weeks. One of the instruments that really caught my attention was the talking drum, which is the first type of telephone—the first type of communication device. It’s a drum you put under your arm on one side of your body and you can press down your arm under the drum and essentially pitch it, so it’s like a voice—you’re literally talking with a drum. And that sound became the sound of the king. That was the first seed of how the instrumentation affected the process. I came across this really interesting guy called Amadou that played the Fula flute [or tambin] and I told him what the movie was about and explained Killmonger’s persona [Killmonger is T’Challa’s rival, returning from exile to challenge his claim to the throne], and he just started to play and it fit so well with the character. So I started connecting all of these different instruments into different themes and characters of the movie.

After I read the script and learned about Wakanda, I thought a lot about what music they would have there. It could be anything! But it’s still in Africa, and music from Africa is a language—it has a purpose. You don’t just play music for people to hear, every rhythm is written for a specific reason—for a ceremony, for the king. The officiants in Africa are called griots, which literally means “storyteller.” The only way to be a griot is if you’re born into it. You’re born into storytelling. If you look at your family tree, there are generations of storytellers. So all the music passes through the generations. There are so many different instruments for every different tribe, and every sound means something.

After I spent the month in Senegal, I traveled to South Africa because I’d heard about the International Library of African Music in Grahamstown. There was a British guy who went around to thousands of different tribes in Africa with a field recorder, recorded the music, wrote down what it meant, bought their instruments, and brought it all back to the library. There are 20,000 vinyl records in there and hundreds of instruments, and a lot of that music doesn’t exist anymore because of colonization. So I spent a lot of time listening to these recordings and discovering. It was an extremely inspiring experience, and I returned to L.A. with a new idea of how I could use all this traditional African music. The most difficult part is that as soon as you put production and orchestra on top of African music, it doesn’t sound African anymore. So the challenge was incorporating these things and making them still feel African.

You mentioned the history of African storytellers using music to tell stories. What role does music play in telling the story for Black Panther?

It was important to me was to make music that fit in culturally with each scene. For example, if there’s a big fight, there are traditional African rhythms created 1,000 years ago for these specific kinds of moments. Finding ways to use these rhythms that have always soundtracked those moments for scenes in the film can make them really special.

Kendrick Lamar and TDE are also working on music for Black Panther. It was revealed that this is the first time multiple original recordings will be used in a Marvel Studios movie. How has the whole process worked, and how will all of the music come together in the film?

The movie has songs and it has a score. There’s a lot of music in it. Being able to have Kendrick on board for a project—that’s like a dream collaboration for everyone. I can’t go into specifics about what’s going on where, but I worked with Kendrick and Sounwave. I was with them in studio for a bit and there are collaborative excerpts throughout the movie.