Cassie Kinoshi: Gratitude

Although she emerged on the British jazz scene as part of the cohort of saxophonists associated with London's post-2015 underground scene—among them Nubya Garcia, Binker Golding, Camilla George and Shabaka Hutchings—alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi has always stood somewhat apart. Her membership of the Afrobeat-inspired band Kokoroko placed her firmly in that underground scene, but her embrace of the Western classical tradition has given her aesthetic trajectory singularity. She has collaborated with London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra, and composed for dance and theatre. Like many of her contemporaries, Kinoshi studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, but, significantly, she majored not in performance but in composition. In an interview to be published in April 2024 on AAJ, Kinoshi says that for as long as she can remember she has regarded herself primarily as a composer.

gratitude is Kinoshi's ten-piece seed. ensemble's second album (she spells the album title and band name without capping up the first letter and adds a full-stop to the band name). It is also Kinoshi's first release on the Chicago-based label International Anthem, home to among others Makaya McCraven, the late great Jaimie Branch and, also debuting in 2024, the British-based bassist Ruth Goller (read Goller's recent AAJ interview here). Kinoshi first entered the International Anthem sphere in late 2022, as part of the label's CHICAGOxLONDON event at the London Jazz Festival.

seed.'s first album, Driftglass (Jazz Re:freshed, 2019, reviewed here), took its name from a collection of science-fiction short stories by the African American writer Samuel R. Delaney. It was, in Kinoshi's words, her way of "celebrating the vibrant and distinctive diversity that has significantly influenced what British culture has become over the centuries... It's important to me that I shine a light on political subject matter which is often disregarded by the masses and highlight what it means to exist as a young Black British citizen today." It was public-facing music which included the timely and memorable "W A K E (for Grenfell)," featuring guest vocalist Cherise Adams-Burnett , on which Kinoshi's lyrics addressed the scandal of a fire that swept through a poorly maintained, jerry-built public housing high-rise in London in 2017, killing 72 people.

gratitude, composed for an expanded eighteen-piece seed. lineup which includes four string players from London Contemporary Orchestra, might seem on the face of it to be a more inward-facing affair. The focus is on mental health. Says Kinoshi, "Highlighting the often-overlooked subject of mental health and what it means to move towards creating healthy, positive and introspective practices in regard to both understanding and regulating one's own mental health, is of the utmost importance to me." One of the most important things contributing to better mental health, as anyone who lives with anxiety and/or depression knows, is being out about it, and Kinoshi, writing from personal experience, is to be congratulated on airing the issue—which action, of course, ultimately makes gratitude as public facing as Driftglass.

Appropriately, Kinoshi makes more use of dissonance than she did on the earlier album, though the music remains largely consonant. Describing it approximately, gratitude develops from a dark place towards sunnier uplands, though the path is not quite as simple as that. Musically and conceptually, it is an important album, and a rewarding one.