The world premiere of a collaboration between alto saxophonist and composer Cassie Kinoshi with her boundary-pushing group seed. (formerly SEED Ensemble, formed in 2016) and the full might of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) under Ben Gernon, met with great success and fruition at London’s Barbican in a confident concert for a diverse audience comfortable with large scale orchestral jazz works (some people call it third stream though it’s more of a river in flood now).
The orchestra and group performed in between two five-movement symphonic works, Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 (Pastoral) and the world premiere of Cassie Kinoshi’s HEART, marking thematic continuity from pastoral to environmental concerns. Pretty bold to put it up against the Sixth, but the newbie convinced for sheer volume, if nothing else, and there was plenty else. It was pretty full on. The 30-minute work opened with maximum bombast before sitting on a throbbing vamp in a weaving texture of improvised guitar and scored strings.
Kinoshi has form for orchestral collaboration, having worked with the Aurora Orchestra in 2021 on her Three Suns Suite. The overall impression of HEART was energetic and full of life and hope. The notes say it “aims to convey sonically both the fragility and resilience of our planet”; the first movement, “indolence”, felt more conveyant of its spectacle and grandeur. The second and fourth movements (“dream and dream”, and “beauty of a tree”) each opened more ambiguously before piling into decisive thematic writing for the horns in the third and firth (“golden horns”, and “wild flames”).
In their 22-minute band set, seed. played three three selections, “tides”, “ivy”, and “neptune”, which had a nice 1960s wigout vibe. The music was good original new Big Band-adjacent jazz of no fixed vintage played by the young octet with passion.
While the LSO orchestra by itself was fine in the Beethoven, if you thought the sound of jazz at the Royal Albert Hall was bad, the notoriously fickle Barbican Main Hall smashed it with levels all over the shop: harsh trumpet and battering drums splitting ears over the murky of the overall sound, drowning out the orchestral detail and clarity. I moved seats twice. Even if the orchestration was lost in the poor mix, Cassie Kinoshi and the band blew with power and energy, and the orchestral collaboration felt organic.
Overall the concert felt like a tremendous achievement for Cassie Kinoshi and seed., and in HEART a welcome addition to third stream repertoire, with a strong message of global community, diversity, compassion and understanding.
