Bio:
Cassie Kinoshi (b. 1993) is a Mercury Award nominated and Ivors Academy Award winning (formerly know as BASCA, British Composer Award) London-based composer, arranger and alto-saxophonist. She is currently working in theatre, film, contemporary dance and both the jazz and classical performance worlds.
Cassie is best known for her work with her large ensemble SEED alongside bands KOKOROKO and NÉRIJA. She was Mercury Musical Developments’ and Musical Theatre Network’s Cameron Mackintosh Resident Composer Scheme recipient at Dundee Rep Theatre from 2018-19 and was a part of the London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Scheme 2018-19.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Theatre composition credits: Top Girls (National Theatre), The Little Prince adpated by Inua Ellams (Stratford Circus Arts Centre), All The Shit I Can’t Say To My Dad (This Is Black, Bunker Theatre), Teleportation (This is Black, Bunker Theatre), Blue Beneath My Skin (This Is Black, Bunker Theatre), SuperBlackMan (Battersea Arts Centre), Pagans (Old Vic Theatre, Old Vic 12), Exceptional Mercy (Old Vic Theatre, Old Vic 12), Hy Brasil (Old Vic Theatre, Old Vic 12) Feather by Feather (Old Vic Workrooms), Bobsleigh Team (Old Vic Workrooms)
Film & Advertising credits: "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”: Tour of the Old Vic (Old Vic Theatre/National Theatre)Undercurrent (London Short Film Festival Best Experimental Film Nominee 2018) ONES, On An Empty Stomach (ICA Best Experimental Short Film Award Nominee 2017)
Awards and Nominations: Mercury Award Nominee 2019 (Driftglass, SEED Ensemble), Jazz FM UK Jazz Act of the Year Nominee 2020 (SEED Ensemble), Jazz FM Album of the Year Nominee 2020 (Driftglass, SEED Ensemble), Jazz FM Breakthrough Act of the Year Winner 2019, Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM Jazz Album of the Year Nominee 2019 (Driftglass, SEED Ensemble), Ivors Academy Award Winner 2018 (formerly known as British Composer Award, BASCA), Best Jazz Composition for Large Ensemble (Afronaut, SEED Ensemble), Parliamentary Jazz Award 2017 for Best Newcomer (Nérija), Jazz FM Breakthrough Act of the Year Nominee 2016 (Nérija), BBC Young Composer of the Year Nominee 2012
Outside of theatre, Cassie has worked as a curator for the Royal Albert Hall's Elgar Room alongside Moses Boyd (Unstoppable Voices, 2018) as well as writing and arranging music for events such as Women of the World Festival 2017 (Royal Festival Hall). She also featured as a part of Soweto Kinch's BBC Four show Jazzology and is regularly invited as a radio and live panel guest to discuss politics, society and music. Cassie also works as an educator and workshop leader, her most recent work being at the EFG London Jazz Festival 2019 for Serious' Womxn Make Music performance at the Southbank Centre.
Formed in early 2016, SEED Ensemble is a Mercury Award nominated ten-piece band led by alto saxophonist and composer Cassie Kinoshi.
SEED Ensemble:
Combining jazz with inner-city London, West African and Caribbean influenced groove, SEED Ensemble explores a blend of genres through original compositions and improvisation. Their debut release Driftglass (Jazz Re:freshed, 2019) features the track Afronaut (feat. XANA) which won the Ivors Academy Award 2018 (formerly known as BASCA, British Composer Award) for Jazz Composition for Large Ensemble.
“…a wonderful reflection not simply of the best of London’s current improvisational music, but a strong perspective representing the city’s young Black creative class.”
- Afropunk
“Cassie Kinoshi is a striking instrumentalist, a musician able to reinterpret material on the fly, while injecting brave new elements in the process…a stunning work, full of daring musicality and spiritual depth.”
- The Clash
" A most fantastic and colourful approach to this piece. So very well done and I'm extremely proud of you all. Big thanks."
- Greg Osby
“…Driftglass is an untrammelled wrap-around delight.”
- All About Jazz
"The richness of the band’s melody, harmony and solo is something we can attest to and that got the crowd going. Band members cut across race and gender; and original compositions are inspired by the social issues of our times. So a night of music by the people for the people about the people? We like. "
- www.sqwzl.com
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).