Masego

Masego is that movement. It’s a grand, eloquent, and somewhat mischievous one, from an artist who thrives on mixing contemplation with extroversion, smoldering romance with knowing humor, and studied musical discipline with exhilarating flights of intuition. Masego is only his second album after the quiet storm of 2018’s critically embraced Lady Lady, a series of EPs going back to 2015, and the frankly phenomenal signature song, Tadow, that wrote his name on the world. But the story this album tells — literally, in vignettes reflecting the contours of his life in all shades of his vast musical palette — encompasses a long journey in pursuit of something higher. For those who came in late, maybe parts of Masego’s backstory need to be spelled out here. The singer-songwriter mother who directed the church choir in Virginia, and the Jamaican father whose roots he retraced on 2020’s Studying Abroad EP. The teenaged hip-hop obsession, the university jazz studies, the birth of his bespoke genre, TrapHouseJazz, designed to digest all this and more; the narrative genius of Outkast, Duelle, Wale; the intoxicating Brazilian mystery of Trio Mocoto and Joao Gilberto... With Masego, all this accumulated inspiration has simply become the atmosphere that he breathes; the landscape for seeking deeper self-knowledge and purpose through music. With the input of an expanding cast of collaborators, it’s in a state of charged evolution.