Ten things to know about John Powell, Han Solo movie composer

Oscar-nominated composer John Powell composed the music for 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, stepping into a lineage evolving from the John Williams foundation. While Williams continues to score the tentpole "saga" film, the torch is being passed to other composers for the spinoff films, starting with Michael Giacchino's Rogue One score in 2016.

So who is John Powell? For the casual film fan, his name is less recognizable than those of either of his predecessors in the Star Wars franchise. Powell has carved out a career not just as a solo composer, but as a keen collaborator often working with other composers to craft truly unique music. To get an understanding of why he fits in the Star Wars universe and what he might bring to this newly evolving franchise, let's take a look at 10 key details of his life, including the two franchises for which he's now best-known.

1. He trained as a violinist from a very young age, which earned him admission to Trinity College of Music in London.

2. He had a brief run playing with soul band the Faboulistics.

3. He started as a composer of commercials and assistant to Patrick Doyle, famed composer of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as well as the recent live-action Cinderella.

4. Before working in film, he composed for two television series: Stay Lucky and High Incident.

5. Like many composers of the 1990s, he was a member of Hans Zimmer's Remote Control Productions, which allowed him the opportunity to not only work on projects with Zimmer, but alongside him as Powell gained his own notoriety — including key collaborations on the Kung Fu Panda franchise.

6. This led to his first major film in 1997: John Woo's action movie Face/Off. It's easy to hear the influence of Zimmer's style in the work, but there are also key distinctions that would grow with Powell as he gained more experience.

7. After Face/Off, he co-scored the film Antz alongside Harry Gregson-Williams. This was the first animated film produced by Dreamworks Animation and began a valuable collaboration with Gregson-Williams (the two would also collaborate on Chicken Run and Shrek) as well as a long career composing for animated feature films.

8. In 2002 he composed the score for The Bourne Identity, which more than any other film set the tone for John Powell's work in the early 2000s: a certain ambient, textural quality with strings and horns counter-balanced by lots of percussion and electronics. With this score he became a very modern composer and began creating music in a way we hadn't heard before.

9. In 2010 he scored the film How to Train Your Dragon and raised the bar again. This was the first animated film with Dreamworks that Powell composed by himself, and it earned him his first Academy Award nomination. What you hear in How to Train Your Dragon is a truly inspired take on a classical film score with a richer appreciation for what an orchestra can achieve. This score, alongside The Bourne Identity, is a pinnacle of quality for Powell.

10. In 2014 he took a second sabbatical from film scoring to compose concert music. One of the outputs was a 45-minute oratorio commemorating the 100-year anniversary of World War I. Titled A Prussian Requiem, the piece premiered on March 6, 2016, at the Royal Festival Hall in London with Jose Serebrier conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and a libretto by Michael Petry.

Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker, and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.