Doug Kazé

Doug Kazé, afrofolk/afrosoul singer-songwriter, was born and raised in the north central Nigerian city of Jos, where he grew up exploring songwriting in different genres. His early musical interest was mainly hip-hop and r&b when he was a teenager in the 1990s. After a journey across genres, Doug founded and worked with the Jos-based rock band, Trybe of the Sealed, for about ten years. During these years, Doug focused more on writing and performing songs in the rock genre, while also exploring fusion possibilities with sounds from his indigenous Plateau and northern Nigerian sounds.

It was however when he left Nigeria for South Africa for doctoral studies at Rhodes University that he began to return to all the genres he had explored in his musical journey and began to be intentional about his current folk/soul sound. His present sound is influenced by artists like Tracy Chapman, Ali Farka Touré, Boubacar Traore, Daps, Ibro Dan Yohanna, among others. In 2014, working with Victor Bala, he released his first album titled Doug Kazé, followed by Paradigm Shift in 2016, which went on to win the 2017 album of the year JOGAMA award. His third album BRAVE was recorded and released during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. He worked with the producer Tapshak Raymond on this project. Balcony, a single also produced by Tapshak and mastered by Tim Lengfeld in South Africa, is his most recent work.