Yoko Kanno

Yoko Kanno stands out as the nearest equivalent to a global ambassador for anime scoring, given her contributions to landmark productions including Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell. She has also supplied original music for television programs, feature films, and interactive titles while penning material for commercial pop performers; the roster of advertising spots assigned to her reads like an inventory of major corporate entities. Her services remain sought after because of an uncommon adaptability that lets her work fluently across ambient and neoclassical idioms as well as techno and hard rock without any impression of contrivance.

Born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1964, Kanno received early musical instruction and at age ten became the youngest recipient of the Yamaha piano competition. She later trained at the Parisian Conservatory for Music and Dance before enrolling at Waseda University, where an affinity for jazz took hold and prompted her entry into the professional sphere as keyboardist and occasional songwriter for Testu 100% between 1986 and 1989. Concurrently she launched her compositional career with the 1985 score for the Japanese title Romance of the Three Kingdoms, continuing to score Koei games through 1994 and entering the pop arena in 1988 via an initial collaboration with Chiyono Yoshino that was followed by work with Keiko Nakajima and Kyoko Endo.

Her trajectory accelerated sharply in 1994 through a partnership with cellist and composer Hajime Mizoguchi—her husband—on the score for the anime series Please Save My Earth and on music for the film Yamato Takeru. By 1996 opportunities multiplied after the score for the widely popular Vision of Escaflowne, again created with Mizoguchi. Kanno ceased game work in 1994 and film scoring in 1997, directing her attention primarily toward anime series and, secondarily, pop artists. Between 1998 and 2008 she supplied themes or full scores for nearly thirty anime projects, among them Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight (1998), Turn a Gundam (1999), Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002)—on which she is rumored to have supplied vocals herself under the pseudonym Gabriela Robin—Wolf's Rain (2003), and Macross Frontier (2008). Her pop engagements reached their height in the late 1990s and early 2000s with contributions to releases by Kyoko Koizumi, Maaya Sakamoto, and Crystal Kay; her first solo album, Song to Fly, appeared in 1998.

Kanno resumed video-game scoring in 2000 with a Dreamcast title and followed it with two entries in the Cowboy Bebop franchise released in 2001 and 2005. She also returned to live-action film scoring in 2002 for Tokyo. Sora and Mizu no Onna, with later notable credits including Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Honey and Clover (2006). Although she devoted reduced effort to pop during this period, she still composed the full album Nagashime Play for Kei Kobayashi (2003), several tracks for teen-pop group SMAP, and the 2007 album Lost in Time by Akino of Bless4—the same year she and Mizoguchi divorced. Her second solo release, 23-Ji no Ongaku, came out in 2002, and in 2008 she assembled selected advertising music on the compilation CM Yoko, documenting another extensive body of work that encompassed jingles for more than seventy clients such as IBM, Japan Railways, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nissan, Sony, Toyota, and Vodafone.