When Adam Silver was a child, his father received a holiday gift from NBC: a set of chimes that, when struck with a little hammer, rang with the three famous notes of the network’s theme.
“We put it on our front hall table,” Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A., said in a recent interview. “And just for fun, my brother and I would always play it. I certainly didn’t understand anything about branding or a signature sound, but that always stayed in my head.”
Years later, in a different household, another child got hooked on a tune. Nicholas Britell saw the movie “Chariots of Fire,” and immediately tried to figure out its pulsating bass line and soaring melody at his family’s upright piano. Wanting to really learn it, he asked for lessons. Now a composer, he has created a slew of scores as instantly recognizable, like the soundtracks for “Succession” and “Moonlight.”
Britell and his brother were also huge basketball fans, raised on John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock” and the Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius” introducing the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls. When Britell found himself in a meeting with Silver a couple of years ago, he told him that it was his dream to write music for the N.B.A. As it happened, Silver was hoping for the same thing.
On April 18, the first day of the N.B.A. playoffs, the league dropped a 90-second spot called “Where Legacies Are Built.” It looked like any other reel of old highlights, but the music was new, its accumulating intensity and exhilaration matched by a voice-over that teased: “The stage is set, the mic is on, there’s only one question left to answer. Who’s got something to say? Tune in, because we’re about to find out.”
“What is the name of the song playing in the background of this vid?” someone commented on YouTube. “Bc, that sounds so fire.”
It was just a taste of the N.B.A.’s partnership with Britell and Nas, who lent vocals to the video. (The rapper also appears in a spot created for the finals, which begin on Wednesday, intoning: “This isn’t just a series, this is legacy. Everything’s on the line, because history is calling.”) If successful, it will all lead to a new musical identity for the league, whose broadcasts are now spread across multiple platforms. It could benefit from consistent branding, whether a two-second tag or a minute-long promo.
“What we’re looking to create,” Britell said, “is some sort of sonic musical landscape that can kind of unify everyone’s experience of the league, in all the places that the league could be.”
DOES A SPORT have a sound? If you think so, musical branding probably has something to do with it. Football is associated with assaultive, brassy punches thanks to Johnny Pearson’s “Heavy Action” and the N.F.L.’s music on Fox. Golf has an entirely different vibe because of Dave Loggins’s pastoral theme for the Masters Tournament, while the Olympic Games have a border-transcending nobility seeded by the fanfares of Leo Arnaud and John Williams.
When Silver was looking to commission new music for the N.B.A., he sought advice from the media executive and podcaster Tommy Alter, who introduced him to Britell and became the composer’s creative partner and producer on the project. At Silver and Britell’s first meeting, they listened to a variety of sports themes, including “Roundball Rock,” which had disappeared from the league’s broadcasts in the early 2000s but resurfaced last year after its licensing was overhauled.
“I received an enormous number of emails from fans,” Silver said of the song’s return. “They were thrilled that John Tesh was back.”
Still, there was a lot of enthusiasm within the N.B.A. for the new project. Britell hosted Alter and players at his home, shared some of what he had composed and talked about what kind of music they liked, “whether to pump up or whatever the mood may be,” Alter said.” Hip-hop was to be expected, but there are also players like the San Antonio Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, better known as Wemby, who loves “Star Wars.” (In a role reversal, he was excited to be in the company of Britell, who wrote the “Andor” soundtrack.)
What Britell came up with wasn’t a single theme but, in his words, a sonic landscape: modular bits of music that can be isolated, layered and expanded for different purposes. (The 90-second playoffs spot is an extravagant example of what happens when it all comes together.) At its core is a downward phrase of four notes.
The notes roll and fall like a ball gently spinning as it’s dribbled. You can imagine the motif standing on its own as a tag during broadcasts, like the NBC chimes. In the spot it repeats, catchily, over rhythmic low strings reminiscent of the foundational beating pulse in the “Chariots of Fire” theme.
At first there is a sense of persistence, but as the music continues it also builds with ever-higher stakes and drama in its harmonies and stabbing strings. Then a hip-hop beat enters; no one involved could imagine an N.B.A. sound without it. “Hip-hop voices and influence has always gone hand in hand with the N.B.A.,” Nas said in an email interview. “They are married to each other in a way.”
Elements of this music can be transformed for specific moments during a broadcast or a big event like the playoffs. “There’s an inherent sort of story shape to a game,” Britell said. “And there’s an archetype to what a season looks like. But the specifics of that are unknown.”
Like any soundtrack, Britell’s music has the power to subtly guide your emotions along the way. When he was experimenting with some old footage of players sitting on a bench and looking out onto the court, he found that when he added a bit of music, “immediately you’re like, Oh my god, these people have worked their whole lives at such a high level to get right there to that moment.”
Sitting at the piano in his home studio on the Upper West Side, Britell demonstrated how, with a shift in harmonic language, the chords of the playoffs spot could become soft underscoring. The downward arpeggio could be chopped and screwed, a hip-hop technique of slowing down and distorting music that he used in “Moonlight,” to spin out new themes.
“There are so many ways you can do something with this,” Britell said. “I’m still curious myself, what people respond to and what the league is interested in. That’s why I’m trying to create a landscape.”
IT BECAME CLEAR early on that the music needed what Britell called “an iconic voice.” The first person he thought of was Nas, whose sound has “a strength and a kind of wisdom, which feels married really beautifully with the philosophy of what we were going for.”
Nas had worked on commercials with the N.B.A. before and was interested, he said, because he thought Britell’s music was cinematic, “with the proper tone for the seriousness of what it was capturing.” The text of his vocals were a collaboration with the league, a back-and-forth of ideas about tension, greatness and legacy.
“You know what time it is,” Nas declaims in the first spot they released. “We all do. There’s a shift in tone, a change in attitude. This is different. Some call it extreme intensity. Others say it’s sheer drama. But we know it by another name: This is the N.B.A. playoffs.”
He goes on to describe the elite skill and emotion of the game, and how “players look to leave a mark on a game that lasts forever.” Together with the music, Britell said, it would “bring out the gravity and the intensity of this moment.”
But does it contain the essence of basketball? That would be difficult for any single project to achieve. Each team and arena has its own sonic identity. For instance, at Madison Square Garden, which in the past month has teemed with electricity and excitement over a historic run of wins for the Knicks, the speakers are almost never silent between the organ playing by Ray Castoldi and an encyclopedic board of prerecorded cues and songs.
Alter said the new music “matches the pageantry and the stakes of what’s happening.” And Silver felt that by including hip-hop, “Nick and Nas have captured the spirit of the league.”
It’s now up to fans whether the music will catch on, and up to the N.B.A.’s broadcasters how much they want to include it. Silver said that he would like it to serve as a kind of “connective tissue,” but that he wouldn’t impose it on them. “We recognize we’re part of something larger, and that’s N.B.A. basketball,” he added. “I think what Nick and I are hoping is that, as we roll this out, others will see it in a similar way, and it will happen organically.”
There are already plans to keep the exchange going between Britell, Nas and the N.B.A. Silver said he had learned enough about marketing over the years to know it might take a long time for fans to adopt the music. “The greatest compliment,” he said, “is to become someone’s ringtone.”
In time, there could be a whole library of music by Britell for the league’s use. “We’re taking our time with it,” he said. “This is an idea I’ve had literally from childhood, essentially. And I’m just sort of pinching myself, that we’re actually doing this.”
