Kanno composed the music for Cowboy Bebop, a score performed by a large live band and moving freely between hard bop, blues, ballad and orchestral writing. The series' identity is inseparable from it: the music sets the register episode by episode, and several episodes are structured around the pieces rather than the reverse.
She is a Japanese composer whose output spans animation, film, advertising and pop production, and she works with performing ensembles assembled for specific projects rather than with session orchestras. Jazz, folk traditions from several continents and electronic music all appear in her work, and she frequently invents languages for her vocal pieces rather than using an existing one.
Recurring subjects: restlessness, scores that change idiom between scenes, and vocal writing in invented or hybrid languages. She composes for specific performers rather than for instruments in the abstract, and her work is characterised by an unwillingness to repeat a solution that has already worked.
Her animation scores are among the most admired in the medium and have introduced enormous audiences to jazz and to orchestral writing. Her work is performed in concert worldwide, and several of her pieces are as widely recognised as the series they accompany.
For listeners who want a score that behaves like an album. Suited to anyone approaching the space bounty hunter series, and to those interested in jazz arranged for animation.
