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Anime Expo 2026: The Traveling Maestro Yoko Kanno

Few composers in the anime entertainment industry achieve household-name recognition. Joe Hisaishi. Yuki Kajiura. Yūki Hayashi. And, of course, Yōko Kanno. Kanno's illustrious career began in the early '90s with head-turning tracks, with a firm foothold in fandom thirty years later. "Tank!", the big-band opener for Cowboy Bebop's jazz- and world-music-influenced soundtrack, continues to find new life, from references in HBO live-action series to the NBA Playoffs.

Western audiences may have discovered Kanno through her work with The Seatbelts, her early work on Macross, and the Magnetic Rose segment of Memories showed flickers of her biggest asset: a composer willing to experiment far beyond genre lines. Kanno's anime debut was Macross Plus, which introduced her to a process she would continue in future projects. She finds inspiration by fully immersing herself in an environment, traveling far beyond Japan's borders to locales that inform a project's setting. Her work on Macross Plus brought her to one of the hottest places on the planet.

"This was almost my very first time working on an anime soundtrack. I made several trips to places that resemble the show's setting — Death Valley, the areas around air force bases — taking in the temperature, the humidity, the sounds, and the smells, and let all of that shape the music. Death Valley was just unbearably hot — no, painful!!" Kanno said.

Kanno's music research trips took her all over the world. For Cowboy Bebop, she went from coast to coast in the United States to Mexico.

"There are places besides New Orleans that had a big influence on the making of Cowboy Bebop — New York, the desert regions of the West Coast, Monument Valley, Mexico... With every project I encounter, I look forward to visiting somewhere close to that work's setting. For Escaflowne, I went to Europe and Italy, for Wolf's Rain, I went to see wild wolves in person... and for Ghost in the Shell [Stand Alone Complex]... I made do with wearing something resembling Motoko's outfit around Tokyo," she said.

While Kanno's music runs the gamut of genres and styles, she doesn't characterize her own work in neat boxes. She's more interested in where her music can take her and how she can learn through her research. Recently, she's been interested in stage plays and ballet and would like to compose something incorporating dance.

"And since I want to visit countries I've never been to and discover cultures, languages, and people I don't yet know, I'd be happy to have work that might come with the chance to travel," she shared.

Macross Plus put Kanno in orbit with other creators who would later become darlings of the anime industry, including future Cowboy Bebop writer and director Keiko Nobumoto and Shinichirō Watanabe. Kanno and Nobumoto were close in age and later worked together on multiple projects, including Wolf's Rain and Space Dandy (also with Watanabe). Nobumoto sadly passed away in 2021 due to cancer. When asked who she would like to work with again, if given the opportunity, Kanno recalled late GitS: SAC singer and composer Origa and Nobumoto.

"I wish I could have made music with Origa just once more. And I wish I could have set music to a script by Keiko Nobumoto, Bebop's screenwriter," she said.

Of all the creators Kanno has worked with over the decades-long career, few have the reputation of the incomparable Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of the Gundam mecha franchise. After wrapping his work as chief director on Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, Tomino stretched his wings to create and direct Brain Powerd, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi series focused on a battle between two factions to prevent the extinction of humanity. Kanno provided the music for this 1998 outing and would later return to work with Tomino on Turn A Gundam the following year. Known as a man who doesn't mince words, I was curious about Kanno's work experience with him.

"Every director has their own distinctive style, their own way of working. Mr. Tomino explains everything so completely through the dialogue that the music never needs to prop it up—and so I felt the music had to 'stand' on its own," Kanno explained. "When we worked on Brain Powerd, the director was in the middle of recovering his strength, a kind of rehabilitation. By Turn A Gundam, he had come through that hard period, and I had the sense that he'd come to place a little faith in the power of music, too. My impression is that, after a long run-up, we finally launched something vast and heavy toward the moon, together."

Kanno has continued to work in anime composition, although her work in the last decade is limited to theme song compositions and arrangements. The last full Kanno soundtrack was Watanabe's 2014 series Terror in Resonance. Why the long absence?

"I was surprised myself to hear that it's been twelve years since I last worked on an anime soundtrack," Kanno said. "It's not as if I consciously decided to stop doing music for anime. That said, I do think there are factors at play—that anyone can make music now on a small production budget, and the state of the global economy. I probably spend more time and money on a production than most other composers, so the terms may be difficult to meet, but whether it's anime or any other kind of work, I want to create pieces that touch the lives of the people who listen to them."

Yōko Kanno performed at the Crypto.com Arena as part of the JPOP Sound Capsule concert at Anime Expo on July 2.