Search online for “saxophone player” and you’ll probably land on Kenny G. Search further and you may find Jamaican-American Masego, 25, the smoothster rehabilitating sax’s sexless image. His bronzed brass-wind peppers cleanly produced jams that take in jazz, hip-hop, electronica and his love of older ladies, without ever feeling cheesy. His instrument even has its own Twitter account and will, he says, “only play on songs that make women twerk”.
Masego – real name Micah Davis – calls his music “TrapHouseJazz”, but don’t let that put you off. There’s stiff competition in the clickpit of Soundcloud rap, but with the help of his mentor, Jazzy Jeff, Masego’s music contrasts lithe and restless rhythms with a breezy romanticism that sounds fresh, not fussy. Masego has said that “playing saxophone over trap beats … just wasn’t what you do” back home in Virginia, where southern rap looms large. But these days his music fits more with the sunny style of Solange, the Internet and Anderson .Paak.
On his debut album, Lady Lady, Masego appears like Pharrell Williams’s slick younger brother in an open silk shirt, singing about how he needs a “sugar mama”, over Neptunes-style, funk. Like those sultry sax serenades, it perhaps shouldn’t work, but it does.
• Lady Lady is out on Island Records. Masego plays Gorilla, Manchester, on 13 September, and Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London, 14 September
