Artist Spotlight: Braye, Port Harcourt’s Jazz and Soul Outlier.
Most artists release their own music and hope to get session work. Braye did it the other way round.
Before he put out a single track under his own name, he spent years as a songwriter and instrumentalist inside other people’s sessions, including work with Tems and Amaarae. Culture Custodian reports that he only started releasing his own music in October 2024.
Nine months after that came a debut EP. Nine months after that, a second one.
Where he’s from
Port Harcourt, and schooled in Accra. Self-taught as a musician.
That combination shows up in what he makes. Nigerian music right now is overwhelmingly Afrobeats and street-pop, and Braye is doing jazz and soul with live instrumentation, which Culture Custodian describes as a rare thing to attempt there at all.
What he sounds like
Take his own reference points rather than adjectives: Amy Winehouse, Frank Ocean, Aṣa, Bon Iver, Ray Charles, Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder.
That is a strange and specific list, and it maps onto the records. Alt-R&B and neo-soul as the base, jazz phrasing on top, and reggae surfacing more often than you would expect. Afrocritik’s review of his second EP describes warm jazz arrangements with Latin percussion, acoustic guitars and brass.
The detail worth knowing before you press play is about the voice. Afrocritik describes his delivery as “conversational, as if he is speaking directly to the subject of his affection rather than performing.” That is the thing that separates him from a hundred other neo-soul singers.
The story of one track
“Stuck” opens the debut EP and it does not stay in one place. Culture Custodian describes it moving from jazz into uplifting reggae inside a single track.
That is a hard trick and a revealing one. An artist who has spent years serving other people’s songs in the studio tends to arrive with more arrangement instinct than a first release usually shows, and a genre change mid-song is arrangement showing off in the best way.
The two EPs
I Wish I Had More Time, released 2 June 2025. Four tracks: “Stuck”, “Slipping Out of Time”, the title track, and “Bring You Home”. His own description, given to Music In Africa:
“This EP is me trying to make sense of the things I didn’t say, the time I can’t get back, and the emotions I couldn’t express.”
And on what he is actually doing with it:
“I’m not just putting out music, I’m sharing my world.”
LOVE STRAY, 2026. Four tracks again: “Deeper Than Love”, “Are You On The Way”, “Bossa Nova” and “Swim With Me”. Afrocritik rated it 8.3 out of 10 and called him “one of the more compelling storytellers emerging in contemporary Nigerian music”.
Two four-track EPs rather than one album, roughly nine months apart. For an artist building an audience from nothing, that is a smarter release pattern than most people manage, and it is worth noticing.
Why the session years matter
There is a version of this story that gets told as paying dues, and it undersells what actually happens.
An artist who spends years as a hired instrumentalist and writer learns things that are very hard to learn any other way. What a producer means when they ask for something warmer. How to serve a song you did not write and do not control. Which of your ideas survive contact with someone else’s record and which were only ever for you.
Braye did that inside sessions for artists operating at the top of Nigerian music, and then walked out with a set of skills most debut artists spend three releases acquiring. It is the most plausible explanation for why a first EP arrives arranged this confidently.
It is also a route worth naming for anyone reading this who plays well and has not released anything. Session work is not the consolation prize for failing to be an artist. For some people it is the apprenticeship.
Where to start
“Stuck”, for the genre change. Then LOVE STRAY in full, which is the more assured of the two records and the one the critics went for.
If you have four minutes, “Bossa Nova” tells you whether the jazz side is for you.
