ISSUE 18

Cassie Kinoshi

Everything at Once

There's something immediately disarming about Cassie Kinoshi. She joins the call from Berlin with the kind of warmth that makes you feel like you've already met, smiling before the pleasantries are done, quick to laugh, entirely unpretentious about any of it.

Within minutes, we're swapping notes on mid-century furniture, because behind her sits a beautiful upright piano and a pair of lampshades that catch the morning light in exactly the right way, and when I mention them, she lights up completely. She loves a vintage find, she says, the kind of thing you pull out of an old shop that London would charge you three hundred pounds for and Berlin sells you for next to nothing. It's the kind of exchange that gets cut from most interviews. I wanted to keep it, because that ease, that warmth, that instinct to find the good thing quietly and without ceremony, is exactly how Cassie Kinoshi moves through the world and through her music.

She'd just come back from Jazz Stroud, where seed. had headlined the festival's expanded 2026 edition, and she was calling from the sanctuary she's slowly built in the German capital, a city she moved to after a stint in Paris that didn't stick. She was drawn to Berlin by the pace, the space and the particular European permission to just exist. Sundays in Berlin, she notes with something close to delight, the shops are shut, and you're forced to sit still. "You can't even get groceries," she laughs. "But I kind of like that — you're forced to just chill."

When Kinoshi was growing up in Welwyn Garden City, twenty minutes outside of North London, her parents' house was always full of music. Her dad played jazz on Sunday mornings and Classic FM in the evenings; her mum watched West Side Story on repeat and dragged the family to the theatre whenever she could. There was traditional Nigerian music and gospel, high-life and Fela, her parents dancing salsa in the kitchen and pulling Cassie in whether she wanted to join or not. She started classical piano at six, clarinet at eleven, and saxophone at thirteen. By the time she left for London to study composition at Trinity Laban, she had already spent years absorbing everything without being told to choose.

Now a Mercury Prize-nominated and Ivors Academy Award-winning composer, arranger and alto-saxophonist, Kinoshi works across contemporary classical music, jazz, improvised music, film, television and visual art. She leads the eleven-piece ensemble seed., holds a residency at the Southbank Centre running through to 2028, and has been commissioned by orchestras and ensembles from the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic to Chineke!, Manchester Collective and the Detroit-based Sphinx Organisation. On paper, the breadth of it is almost difficult to track, but in conversation, it makes complete sense. Because from the very beginning, she was always doing all of it at once.

"As a Black woman in composition, to find people who are actually willing to believe in what you're creating, who pass you opportunities and tell you it's going to be okay — I found the right people across the timeline after graduating. That really helped."

Moving to London at eighteen wasn't just a change of city; it was, as she puts it, her second growing up. Trinity Laban gave her the orchestration and the theory, but the real education was everything around it: the installations at Goldsmiths she'd wander into, the Tomorrow's Warriors sessions where she learned jazz improvisation as a communal practice, the afrobeat band she set up at university, Saba Afrobeat, with a lineup that would eventually seed KOKOROKO and much of the scene that followed. It was also where she got deeper into her own heritage, Vincentian on her mother's side, Nigerian and Sierra Leonean on her father's, in ways that simply hadn't been possible growing up in Hertfordshire. "If I'd moved to Boston," she tells me, "I wouldn't be the same composer. I wouldn't have the grounding in my British and West African and Caribbean heritage, that wouldn't come through my music in the same way."

The composition world, and she's honest about this, wasn't always welcoming. There was a competitive, judgmental energy at Trinity that made her feel watched, assessed on whether she knew the right names, was pursuing the right sound, and had found her voice early enough. What saved her was the balance: the warmth of Tomorrow's Warriors against the coldness of certain academic rooms, and the mentorship of composer Andrew Poppy, who she studied under at Trinity and credits as one of the main reasons she kept going. "As a Black woman in composition," she says carefully, "to find people who are actually willing to believe in what you're creating, who pass you opportunities and tell you it's going to be okay, I found the right people across the timeline after graduating. That really helped."

Alongside the jazz and classical worlds, she was spending her university years going deep into electronic music, YouTube rabbit holes, Actress, Mica Levy, Ollie Coates, a tape Mica Levy made with producer Kwes that she still talks about with the urgency of someone who heard it last week. She was already combining field recordings and electronics with her composition work; there was a piece at Trinity involving Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech blasted in a corridor with a graphic score for improvised drum and alto sax, but it's taken a decade for electronics to fully enter her concert hall work. Not because the interest wasn't there. Because the headspace and the right room had to be found first.

That room, eventually, was the LCO. Her early experience with the LSO was formative but constrained; when she suggested making the orchestra improvise, her mentor at the time gently steered her away from the idea. Years later, working with the London Contemporary Orchestra on what would become the gratitude commission, she found players who simply said yes. "I want it to sound like this," she told them. "Yeah, yeah, we can do that." The resulting performance, seed., NikNak's turntablism, and the LCO at the Southbank's Purcell Room, was recorded live on the night of the premiere, without Kinoshi knowing it would become an album. She'd handed the parts to the musicians on the day, having written right up to the wire, having struggled with the blocks that come when a piece is about your own mental health, and there's nowhere to hide from it. "Maybe working to the deadline pushed me to just do it," she reflects, "to accept this is it, without any proper time to revise it. Maybe that's why it ended up being quite an honest piece of music."

"I'm just getting to a point where I'm honestly combining all of my interests. Electronic. Jazz. Improv. Orchestral. Finding and shaping a very honest expression of me."

She lives in Berlin now, and talks about the city in the way people talk about a good relationship, with a kind of grateful surprise, like she's still slightly amazed it's working. She's back in London almost every month, for shows or premieres or family, and she loves it still, but something about Berlin has quieted something down. The pace of it, the Sundays, the European insistence on sitting with your coffee rather than eating lunch at a station. "What allows you to access something in composition and music," she says, "is having headspace, space to think, space to just sit and be. And Berlin allows that a little bit more."

She's performing with seed. at Manchester Jazz Festival this May, and the next few years are shaping up to be the most expansive of her career, new commissions arriving from multiple directions at once, each pulling a different thread of everything she's spent fifteen years quietly weaving together. This June, she premieres a brand-new piece for piano and string quartet with Manchester Collective as part of their Patterns in Repeat programme, joining a bill alongside Meredith Monk and Cassandra Miller, composers for whom music, as the Collective put it, is an embodied experience rooted in the body itself. It's the kind of company that feels right.

Also this June, she takes a new work to the Sphinx Organisation's Sphinx Connect, and earlier this year her commission for Max Richter's Possible Futures premiered at the Southbank Centre, the institution where she now holds a residency through to 2028. She talks about wanting to properly get into film scoring — she's a devoted sci-fi reader, drawn to the music of Arrival, the slow interior cinema of Drive My Car, the dark wit of *The End of the F***ing *World**, and about site-specific work that takes over spaces and transforms them into whole other worlds. Beyond all of it, a synthesis she can already feel approaching, where jazz, electronics, improv and the orchestral tradition stop being separate things and become one fully honest language. "Just getting to a point," she says, "where I'm honestly combining all of my interests. Electronic. Jazz. Improv. Orchestral. Finding and shaping a very honest expression of me."