This is a compendium of information about the music in Oga’s Cantina at Disney’s Galaxy Edge.
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According to this L.A. Times article, the producers at Disney commissioned 29 songs for Oga’s Cantina. 27 are included in the two playlists.
18 tracks were released as “R-3X’s Playlist #1” on Sep 6, 2019. (6 of those were released as a preview on Aug 23, 2019, the day before the D23 Expo.) This is a digital download that can be purchased from Apple, streamed on Spotify, and heard on YouTube.
9 more were released as “R-3X’s Playlist #2” on Apr 7, 2023. This can be purchased from Apple, and streamed on Spotify.
The video game expansion pack "The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey To Batuu" includes two radio stations of Galaxy's Edge music. Station DJ R-3X Stereo includes only songs from the official playlists, but station Batuu Radio includes 3 unreleased songs. (The fact that these songs have been omitted from two Oga’s Cantina playlists suggests they may only by used on BSO 401.72, the radio station that can be heard throughout the park.)
The Brewhouse Music site includes an unreleased non-song piece, R-3X Opening Track.
Oga’s Cantina is not the only music in Galaxy’s Edge. In addition to the John Williams themes for Savi’s Workshop, Rise Of The Resistance, and Smuggler’s Run, there is also ambient music out in the streets. Three of the tracks from Batuu Radio are ambient music; the first two play in the marketplace, the third plays in the courtyard outside Docking Bay 7:
Randy Kerber and Harlan Hodges are 2 of the 3 people who comprise Aporia Entertainment.
Short excerpts of Marketplace and 6 other ambient pieces are available on Harlan Hodges’ site.
The Entrance Theme by Randy Kerber is up on the Soundcloud page of Adam Michalak, who recorded and mixed the track.
An hour of the Resistance Forest sounds is up on YouTube.
R-3X’s Playlist includes a remix of "Cantina Band", the most recognizable piece of diagetic music from the movies, but there many more that would fit in Oga’s Cantina.
There are 4 by John Williams:
Lapti Nek was replaced in the 1997 Special Edition release of Return Of The Jedi by Jedi Rocks, written by Jerry Hey.
For the sequel trilogy, Lin-Manuel Miranda was asked by J.J. Abrams to produce several pieces of music:
The Solo movie has a lounge song by John Powell. He talked about it with syfy.com. It is supposedly Huttese.
The Oculus VR game "Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge" has music in Seezelslak's Cantina. One song, Pinteeka Dub by composer Danny Piccione, is available on YouTube.
If you’re fascinated by who on Earth actually creates songs in the voices of jawas and droids, this section covers the artists who created the music for Oga’s Cantina.
The producers of the music for Oga’s Cantina were Matt Walker, the executive in charge of music at Walt Disney Imagineering, and Yaron Spiwak, a senior creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering. The pair were interviewed by Billboard about the general strategy for the project.
They credit LucasFilm employees Matt Wood from Skywalker Sound and David Collins for writing the lyrics in the alien languages of Star Wars. Wood is a 5-time Academy Award nominee for sound editing, and also the voice of General Grievous and a few other characters. Collins is the lead sound designer / voice director with the video game division of LucasArts and has done some acting and voice acting for them as well.
Matt Walker also hosted an hour-long panel discussion at D23 Expo 2019 about the music, featuring singer Judith Hill, Disney Group songwriter Jason Mater, Matt Wood, and composer / producer Adam Dorn.
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1.1 Mad About Mad About MeR-3X, featuring Figrin D’an and the Modal NodesThis is a dance remix of the iconic 1977 John Williams song, known simply as "Cantina Band" on the original Star Wars soundtrack. It later became known as "Mad About Me" by Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes. The purported remixer is R-3X, the robot DJ (originally RX-24 aka "REX") who formerly piloted the Star Tours ride. He is voiced by Paul Reubens, better known by his stage name Pee Wee Herman. The track info does not credit the actual human who did the remix, but this article credits producer Adam Dorn. |
Mus Kat & Nalpak is a play on the last names of the composers, percussionist Tamir Muskat and saxophonist Ori Kaplan. Both grew up in Israel and now work in Brooklyn. The duo founded Balkan Beat Box, a world music fusion band with heavy klezmer and punk influences.
The fourth Mus Kat and Nalpak song, Til The Spire, is in "The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey To Batuu".
For More: What they do doesn’t take much alteration to fit in Batuu. If you want more music like that in Oga’s Cantina, definitely check out Balkan Beat Box. They have a YouTube channel with many of their songs; a good place to start is Kum Kum.
Created by Francis Ralls, who made his name doing TV show music, including Dancing With The Stars and NBC’s NFL broadcasts. He has done other projects for Disney, including the music for the Color Fest Street Parade at Disneyland Shanghai.
For More: Ralls has released an EP called Piano Take 1, and created a number of soundtracks; the soundtrack for the movie The Ride has been released. Samples of both are available on YouTube. His name is also on a 2018 version of Joy To The World, one of the tracks on an album called Oh Christmas Glee. Of more interest to Star Wars fans are the 5 tracks he contributed to a collection called Space Adventure 2 in 2018. One of them is available on YouTube.
This is by Judith Hill. She started her career as a backing vocalist, supporting artists like Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, and Gregg Allman. In 2013, she won a Grammy for Best Music Film for her part in 20 Feet From Stardom, a documentary about backup singers.
For More: Hill released her debut solo album in 2015, produced by Prince, and has since put out two more albums. Much of that material is available on her YouTube channel.
Composed by Melissa Atwell, a Disney regular. She has worked on projects for every Disney Park, and has also done work for AT&T, Lockheed Martin, the Orlando Magic, Sesame Street, and Six Flags.
The band name is a play on the names of the composers, Valerie Vigoda and Ryan O’Connell.
Vigoda is a singer, electric violin player, and composer. She linked the song on her Facebook page. She is a founding member of the musical group GrooveLily, and has toured with Cyndy Lauper and Joe Jackson. She has written a number of musicals with usual collaborator and now husband Brendan Milburn.
For More: O’Connell’s site lists the other collaborations between the two. One is Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, a stage play that was turned into a movie, where Vigoda starred, and O’Connell was music director. A few songs from that, plus a lot of other material by Vigoda, are on her YouTube channel.
Gubz is Adam Gubman. He is best known as a composer for video games, having scored over 600 titles since Pirates Of The Burning Sea in 2006. He has also done a good number of commercials, a few movies, and he is a regular composer for Disney Park events. He has worked with Michael Bolton, Carole King, and Spinal Tap. His company is Moonwalk Audio.
Gubman and Matthew Wood from Skywalker Sound are behind the track Blue Milk Surprise in "The Sims 4: Journey To Batuu".
For More: Gubman also produced the Grammy winning and Oscar nominated song This Is Me, from The Greatest Showman. More recently he created Seeds, an animated musical. His music for Arknights is excellent.
Both songs are by Michael Kramer. The former is done in the style of the original cantina band, so is “by” Figrin D’an. The latter band is a play on his last name. Kramer was inspired to become a composer by Jurassic Park, and went on to score Lego Star Wars, so is deeply familiar with John Williams’ work. GWW did a great interview with him, about his background, his inspirations, and his process.
For More: Kramer’s YouTube channel mostly contains samples from his soundtrack to the Lego TV series Ninjago.
The first track is Zain Effendi and Tyler Martens, the second is Zain Effendi and Dylan Lane. Effendi worked on the team that did the music for Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 and a number of other high-profile movies, then went solo. He is represented by Air Edel.
For More: Check out Effendi’s song Dark Mission.
Yossi Cohen and Avishay Goren are two of the composers at Brewhouse Music. They are primarily composers of commercials. The pair did “Movement is Happiness (Find Your Thing)” for Just Dance 2015. A bio of Goren is available on Sync Summit.
For More: The Brewhouse Music site includes a portfolio, which has 3 unreleased Oga’s Cantina tracks.
Jason Mater is a producer and songwriter with Disney Music Group. The band name is his name spliced into the sounds in the song.
For More: Mater recently cowrote a country hit with Sam Grow called Nobody’s You. He has a long list of credits on AllMusic.
These four are all by Dan Fontana and Roger Butterley. Fontana is the founder of Ty Fy Studios, an industrial music shop in Orlando, which has done a lot of work for Disney. Butterley is a Senior Music Producer at Disney. Here is a genuinely heartwarming picture of the duo at Oga’s.
For More: Ty Fy Studios has a ton of samples on their music portfolio page.
Kai Vokals is a play on the last name of L.A.-based Israeli songwriter and producer Nitzan Kaikov, a.k.a. K-KOV.
This profile on the Avid site introduces Jintae Ko as "a GRAMMY Award-winning songwriter and producer for the Disney Music Group and its subsidiary Hollywood Records".
For More: Check out his Spotify page.
Stephen James Taylor is a long-time film and TV score composer. He got his start on 1980s hits like The A-Team and Magnum, P.I. He has done a number of projects with Disney since the 1990s, including TV shows Jungle Cubs and Raw Toonage, and received a Daytime Emmy nomination for Music Direction for his work on the TV show Timon & Pumbaa.
For More: He has a ton of samples on his personal page.
This song is by Israeli musician Reut Yehudai.
For More: Check out her Spotify page.
Credit is to Louis Johnson. There are a million Louis Johnsons out there. This is clearly not the famous bass player who died in 2015.
Galma from "The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey To Batuu" was written by Guy Mayzig, an Israeli musician from Lod.
For More: Check out Mayzig’s YouTube channel.
Ti Lo Laka from "The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey To Batuu" is by Beckerman Green & Douek. Beckerman is probably Joel Beckerman, since his company Made Music Studio does other branding music for Disney. Douek is probably Joel Douek.
Some of the songs are nonsense, but there are a few written in the languages created for the films.
Yocola Ateema, Huttuk Cheeka, Moulee-Rah, and Goola Bukee are in Huttese, which is a well-developed language. The subject matter of the Huttese songs is entertainingly gangsta.
Utinni is Jawa. Una Duey Day is Gungan for "One Two Three"; there is not a large enough Gungan vocabulary available to do further translation. Batuu Boogie is possibly Ithorian?
The vocabulary for the translations is from Ben Burtt's Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide and Complete Wermo’s Guide.
Major credit to Anthony for tackling the first one, getting it perfect, and figuring out that translation was even a possibility. (The rest are mostly collaborations.)
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The [unknown words] and the slightly mocking ~second voice~ are marked.
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(The verse is obviously a mess; it's not even completely clear where the word boundaries are. "mikiyuna chess ko yuna" doesn't entirely make sense; perhaps "jeeska" (keep) or "cheeska" (cheat) instead of "chess ko"? "wata" in the bridge is a guess; it could be "waba" (wish) or something else.)
The dictionary of known words in Jawa is small, so this is just a fragment.
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