Kanade and Russell conjectured several Rogers-Ramanujan-type partition identities, some of which are related to level $2$ characters of the affine Lie algebra $A_9^{(2)}$. Many of these conjectures have been proved by Bringmann, Jennings-Shaffer and Mahlburg. We give new proofs of five conjectures first proved by those authors, as well as four others that have been open until now. Our proofs for the new cases use quadratic transformations for Askey-Wilson and Rogers polynomials. We also obtain some related results, including a new proof of a partition identity conjectured by Capparelli and first proved by Andrews.