Najee, also known as Jerome Najee Rasheed, is a jazz, smooth jazz and contemporary jazz saxophonist and flautist from Jamaica and the United States, born in 1957. He is associated with jazz-funk as well as smooth, contemporary forms of jazz, and he releases music through Najee Music Publishing.

Background and training

Najee is born in New York, NY and studies at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He plays tenor, alto and soprano saxophones, and he is also an accomplished flautist.

Career

He is one of the early innovators of urban contemporary jazz and smooth jazz, a style that grows in popularity through the 1990s and continues to the present. In 1983, he is a member of Chaka Khan’s band on The Ain’t Nobody Tour. He also plays and tours with Prince from 2001 to 2003, and he records on Prince’s The Rainbow Children album and appears on One Night Alone (Live). His work with other artists includes recordings and performances with Freddie Jackson, Will Downing, Phil Perry, Patti LaBelle, Phyllis Hyman and Jeffrey Osborne, as well as with instrumentalists Marcus Miller, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, Larry Carlton, Billy Cobham, Charles Earland, Paul Jackson Jr. and George Duke.

Recordings and recognition

Najee’s first four albums are certified Gold by the RIAA. He receives a Grammy nomination in 1988 for “Najee’s Theme”. His greatest-hits album, The Best of Najee, is released in 1998. In 1998, he also records a tribute album to Stevie Wonder that features songs from Wonder’s 1976 album Songs in the Key of Life.

He wins the Soul Train Music Awards for Best Jazz Artist in 1993 and 1995, and later receives the NAACP Image Awards in 2006 and the Trumpet Awards in 2008.