Saxophonist YolanDa Brown is considered by many to be one of a kind. A MOBO winner, she re-interprets current chart-toppers, Jazz, Afro-Jazz, Gospel, Reggae, Salsa, Hip-hop, R&B, with consummate ease, her style and phrasing always remaining her own.

In 2012 YolanDa's debut Album "April Showers May Flowers" topped the Jazz Charts, peaking at number 1 on both the iTunes and Amazon Jazz Charts.

Think saxophones, and most of us will immediately start thinking of jazz, specifically trad jazz. No bad thing, maybe, as there are few instruments as beautiful as the saxophone, and few sounds as effortlessly beautiful as jazz, but YolanDa Brown is someone who has made the instrument truly her own, a miraculously gifted saxophonist fluent in a whole lot more than just that one genre.

As her two EPs to date, July 2007's Finding My Voice and August 2008's A Step Closer, so volubly attest, here is an artist who takes jazz and introduces it to all sorts: to soul, to R&B and gospel, to loping reggae and infectious Latin. She can sound at once emotionally raw and incontestably infectious, and she can make it sound like no one else on earth.

For the past three years now, she has performed with some of the music world's most respected artists, and her name on the bill alone can sell out all sorts of venues. She has won 2 prestigious MOBO Awards, has presented an arts show on television, and is currently putting the finishing touches to a debut album which will firmly establish her on modern music's cultural map. Right now, YolanDa Brown is a star in waiting. She won't have to wait very much longer.

Awards and Nominations:

• Honorary Doctor of Arts (University of East London) 2010
• MOBO Awards Winner “Best Jazz” 2009
• Urban Music Award Winner “Best Jazz” 2009
• Urban Music Award Nominee “Most Inspiring Act” 2009
• Marlborough Jazz Festival “Best Performer” 2009
• MOBO Award Winner “Best Jazz” 2008
• Urban Music Award Nominee “Best Jazz” 2008
• WIEA Award Winner “Best Musician 2008”

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In her early 20s, she started to play live, her natural gift bringing her to the attention of all sorts of artists who promptly invited her out on the road with them. Over the past few years she has played with Alexander O'Neal, Mica Paris, Omar, Soweto Kinch and Sway. She learned plenty with each, but it also whet the appetite of someone who didn't just play an instrument but also wrote her own songs. By 2006, she was ready to launch herself as a solo artist.

With no record deal on the table and having never tried to set out by herself before, you'd expect the prospect would have confounded her, but YolanDa simply employed her smarts.

By the time she came to headline her debut concert, at London's Mermaid Theatre in July 2007, it was completely sold out. In centre stage, she proved an absolute natural, someone who could command the limelight all by herself, and who could play the saxophone like someone possessed.

From there, she ventured out into the world. She has played at jazz venues in Miami, and at the Frankfurt Auto Show. She has appeared at the Rotterdam Carnival and at Spain's IslaVuelta's Festival. She has played before the High Commission and at the Ocho Rios Festival in Jamaica. For 18 months, she hosted her own talk show - entitled, confusingly, Esther (after a character in the Bible) on Passion TV and she toured the UK with The Temptations. She ended 2008 by picking up a MOBO Award for Best Jazz Act.

Right now, she is everybody's best kept secret, an industry buzzword. Pretty soon, YolanDa Brown will be instantly recognizable. She might just turn out to be a national treasure, this one.