Cassie Kinoshi: ‘making any kind of art comes down to the relationships you have with people’

When Cassie Kinoshi was eight years old, she wanted to be an author. She even wrote a small adventure series, dreaming of one day becoming a fantasy and science-fiction writer.

Now in her early 30s, the British multidisciplinary artist is decidedly very much in that realm – albeit, through a different medium. Like many of us in 2026, musician Kinoshi is a freelancer surfing the ebb and flow of work, going from project to project in an array of different hats. Not that she’s complaining, she says, speaking on a call from her home in Berlin – as someone who has always been interested in a variety of things, she loves how her work can be so amorphous. ‘I like doing a lot of different things, and music can fit into so many spaces,’ she says.

Those spaces, in Kinoshi’s case, include being a renowned bandleader, notably with her group, seed. – formerly, SEED Ensemble – who were nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2019 for their album, Driftglass (named after Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction short story collection of the same name). The gag that Kinoshi made in interviews at the time was that they were the ‘token’ jazz act that year – but listen to the record, and you’ll hear a sublime, sprawling, affirming love letter to the cosmic possibilities of music and the stories it can tell.

Kinoshi is also a composer, known for her production and scoring work across contemporary dance, opera, visual art performances, installations, theatre, film and TV – she recently provided the music for the Channel 4 series Schooled! and is currently ‘really excited about’ creating the score for the forthcoming television adaptation of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s beautiful novel, Open Water. She’s worked in teaching, in arranging, and, of course, she’s an alto-saxophonist who has previously been a member of other revered groups, such as KOKOROKO and Nérija.

‘What I do crosses into so many different realms in terms of the mediums, and I think not everyone is aware that I actually write for about ten different ways of receiving art,’ she says, ‘artists are multifaceted and always doing about six different things.’ We discuss how social media is now expected to be a portfolio of sorts, and how if something isn’t online, people won’t know about it. ‘A lot of the stuff I do is larger scale and unfortunately not all of it is recorded,’ she explains, ‘So a lot of people don’t know that I do lots of other things.’

Her boundlessness in terms of work, Kinoshi suspects, is rooted in her upbringing. Born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, to parents of Nigerian, Sierra Leonean and Vincentian heritage, she notes that her mother was an English teacher who made sure to take the family to the theatre. ‘We used to watch loads of musicals and things together,’ Kinoshi recalls, ‘so it’s all of these different aspects that I’m actually working in now – stage-work, concert hall music, dance, film – the arts, basically. That’s all come from growing up around that and realising that music was the best way for me to express my inner narrative clearly, aside from fiction-writing, which I also love.’

She recounts how music was always playing in the background in the Kinoshi household. ‘My parents really liked listening to a lot of soul, gospel, funk, salsa, Latin American music, jazz,’ she lists off, ‘my dad had a thing where he’d put on Classic FM every Sunday.’ From the age of six, Kinoshi started having classical piano lessons, and quickly found she was interested in improvisation and making up her own songs. ‘Me and my brother would even have a game where we’d make up songs together,’ she recalls, ‘there was always making music with people.’

Now, continuing her relationship with the Southbank Centre, Kinoshi is one of the centre’s Associate Artists. ‘I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to create something at an institution that has been sort of a pillar of my entire artistic journey during my time in London,’ she says, ‘you know, from Tomorrow’s Warriors – from before that, going to shows.’ Her most recent album with seed., gratitude, was recorded in the Purcell Room, and so the ongoing connection feels important to Kinoshi. ‘It’s a great opportunity to then be able to use the space in a bigger way and get support from the Southbank Centre at a more mid-career stage. It’s been good to sort of understand what is possible on a larger scale […] I wish that more institutions in the UK, in particular, did these kinds of residencies where they give artists the opportunity to create larger scale work.”

The opportunity to think and create on a more expansive level is not something that Kinoshi takes for granted – her career is often flattened into more easily digestible terms. In the years following her emergence, Kinoshi was simply heralded as one of the stars of ‘the London jazz scene’, erasing much of her multi-faceted oeuvre. People will often make assumptions about the kind of music she’ll make in the classical space, she says: ‘In the European classical sphere, because I come from a background of playing the saxophone, playing Black American improvised music – which some would call jazz. People assume that everything I write in the European classical sphere is going to be like ‘jazzy’, but I actually also very much enjoy writing more abstract, more experimental, more floating kind of music as well.’

That’s not to say that Kinoshi isn’t interested in storytelling being political. Her work has previously touched on Grenfell, the realities of being a Black British woman, and she mentions that she’s currently working on music about our relationship with the natural world and the climate crisis. ‘I like to write about the collective human experience,’ she says, ‘I write about everything, and everything is related. But even writing about, I don’t know, appreciating the sky…that could still be seen as political, because that could be about the freedom that everyone deserves to be able to do that.’

What is perhaps central then, is the freedom to write about what you want to write about, and to be afforded the nuance of doing so. Ultimately, Kinoshi reckons a lot of this is down to visibility. And, for now, she certainly has more than enough coming up to keep these conversations visible: it’s no wonder that when we speak, she comes back to how balance and rest are at the forefront of her mind lately. There’s the aforementioned Open Water score, along with a new large-scale Black American improvised piece commissioned by Konzerthaus Berlin, plus writing the music for an opera at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam called The Monster Trilogy, an adaptation of Black American theatre-maker and performer Michael Matthews’ play of the same name. She also still hopes to one day write a book.

For now, though, Kinoshi’s music across various threads is weaving all manner of tales. ‘I think composition and writing with words are effectively the same thing through different mediums,’ she says, ‘it’s just storytelling.’