Soweto Kinch, the British sax player attracting the hottest raves since Courtney Pine and Denys Baptiste, is flying solo with his debut album under his wing.

Last month's release of Conversations With The Unseen, on the Dune label, marked the official launch of his solo career.

Now, having previously appeared in York in the Jazz Jamaica All Stars - with fellow J-Night participant Guy Barker - and in the Juliet Roberts band, Soweto returns tomorrow to lead the Soweto Kinch Quartet at the National Centre for Early Music.

"To be honest the solo work is something I've felt like I've been building up to for the past couple of years," says the self-taught jazz saxophonist from Handsworth, Birmingham. "Working on workshops in Birmingham and with Juliet and Jazz Jamaica have been like climbing a ladder, and it's been a psychological progression."

Last year, he won the White Foundation International Saxophonist of the Year Award at the Montreuz Jazz Festival, and a few weeks later the Rising Star prize came his way at the BBC Radio Jazz Awards.

With every award, expectations rise still higher, and at only 25, there is time aplenty for Soweto Kinch to develop his choppy, rhythmically agile playing style still more.

"Musically, the awards are a small step on the ladder but in terms of being treated as part of the jazz inheritance, it's a burden but it's also a stimulus, and I do enjoy that pressure," he says.

"I do enjoy a little expectation, something to rise to, and I like to try to exceed those expectations if there are sceptics, because just like classical music, there's an extreme expectation that is seldom satisfied."

To prove the point, rap and hip-hop enthusiast Soweto has embraced the spoken word in his debut album, arming himself with the motto "Be yourself and be of your time".

"Though I do understand that some jazz and hip-hop fusions have been lazy, I would say they have been market orientated, but mine is absolutely not market driven. Everyone in my band listens to hip-hop and rap and jazz, and that's why I'm being true to my tastes and influences," he says. "Charles Mingus's The Clown album had spoken words on it, so there's history!"

Soweto is being true, too, to a love of language that might have led him to journalism after he completed his Modern History degree studies at Oxford. "I'd written quite a lot of poetry at school, and there's music in words themselves, and I think what attracted me to journalism was an interest in words and writing," he says.

"Then I did a couple of placements, one at The Times and one at Pebble Mill, but having seen the long, hard hierarchy involved at The Times, I thought I'd never get past that hierarchy."

Instead, the history student's jazz playing graduated from weekly sessions at the Wheatsheaf in the Oxford High Street to working with Tomorrow's Warriors and Jazz Jamaica. The rest is jazz modern history.

Updated: 10:02 Friday, May 23, 2003