By Kevin Kiner

Disney, out now

The score for the latest Disney+ animated show.

Tales Of The Jedi is a Disney+ animated series of six roughly 12-minute episodes, three covering important stages of Ahsoka Tano’s life – her birth and toddlerhood, a training exercise that ties in to her survival of Order 66, and her returning to the struggle in the early days of the Empire – and Count Dooku’s fall from the Jedi Order to the Dark Side.

The episode order on Disney+ mixes up these two plotlines, but here on the soundtrack album they’re more comfortably separated into two distinct groups, with the first thirteen tracks covering the Ahsoka episodes, and tracks 14-25 covering the Dooku episodes. This works well as far as the developing themes and flow of the music is concerned, and as a listening experience, and offers us the question of whether this was the originally planned episode order or whether Kiner simply decided this was a better way to listen.

If you followed the Clone Wars, Rebels and The Bad Batch series then you’ll already be familiar with Kiner’s work, and indeed there are some moments of touching familiarity here, with, as you might expect, Ahsoka’s theme popping up here and there to wonderful effect. The range of emotional notes and styles here, though, is if anything wider ranging than in any of those other series. It feels as if there’s a bigger orchestra, with more exotic instrumentation from different musical cultures too, yet this also may simply be the level of development and evolution that Kiner has made over the course of his long involvement with animated Star Wars.

The opening track is the touching and filled with potential “Ahsoka’s Birth”, followed by “Ahsoka’s Village” and “Sanctity of Life” which have a faint air of Disney’s style of ethnic exotica, as heard in the scores for the likes of the live action The Jungle Book or Mulan, with woodblocks, slutes, and so forth. These are nicely handled sort of exoticism, if rather ordinary for the house sound. After the discordant threat of “The Tiger” things then change up to properly incorporate the feel of the Star Wars universe, as “Ahsoka Returns” beautifully mixes the Force theme with Ahsoka’s theme.

The next three tracks return us to the Clone Wars era, with intriguing and exciting cues that flavour the emotional import with echoes of music from the previous series, before “Secret Mourner” takes us to a reprise of Padme’s funeral music, mixed with a suitably mournful and searching side to it. The highlights, though, come with the last two Ahsoka-centric tracks, “The Inquisitor” and “Ahsoka Is Ready”. Both of these build tension with the promise of epic scale, then unleash it with a powerful percussion; woodlocks and taiko-type percussion giving an almost but not quite chanbara styling that is so much more and turns it up to eleven. These were from the best scenes in the Ahsoka episodes, but even if you haven’t seen them, the music will show you close enough. You can see appropriate imagery just from the sound.

The album’s second half then takes a very different turn, to a very different tone, with the musical journey of Count Dooku’s doubts and eventual fall to the Dark Side. There’s very little of John Williams’ original Dooku theme from Attack Of The Clones to be heard – or at least recognised – but there is a hint of it at the very beginning of “Murder Case” and in the melody of “Dooku Contemplates” – albeit so slowly that’s difficult to notice. (Dooku’s original theme being more a refrained phrase rather than a fully developed theme to start with doesn’t help in the recognisability stakes).

In a lot of ways, Kiner here gives us a new tragic theme for the character, spread through the tracks of his episodes. The second half of the album as a whole carries a tone and atmosphere of tragic loss of promise and inner pain, interspersed with the occasional moment of martial threat (as in “Soldiers Arrive”) as it builds toward the wonderfully downbeat epic “Dooku Vs Yaddle”, which brings us the most tragic duel music and saddened take on the Force theme. Really this track would have worked better as the final track on the sequence, though it’s actually track 24 of 25, with the lesser and already more familiar tones of “Dooku’s Fall” at the very end.

This half of the soundtrack feels like it uses a smaller orchestra and narrower range than the Ahsoka-themed half, especially with the more synthesised-feeling choral parts, but it still works beautifully, despite the downbeat ending.

Verdict: It’s a lovely new take on Star Wars scoring, and in both halves manages to be more intimate, emotionally charged, and thoughtful than might be expected. Arranging the track order the way it is makes it a rather downbeat experience but it’s no less effective for it. Kiner’s Star Wars work has come a long way, and this really showcases how well his music conveys the emotional impact of its characters. Wonderful stuff. 10/10

David A McIntee