“Being a musician and a bandleader and a composer is a bit like a Venn diagram,” says Nubya Garcia, who is all those things and more. “Each requires slightly different things from you, but they all involve extreme dedication. To have full facility of your horn, to be able to listen and respond and have all the harmonic expressions you want to push the music forward, means hours and hours of practice.”
We’re at the KEF Music Gallery in central London, where the tenor saxophonist, 33, is launching her sophomore album “Odyssey” with a photo exhibition while her new project, all 14 tracks worth, pulses from state-of-the-art speakers. A gaggle of Garcia’s close girlfriends are here, cheering on her stories of challenges relished and creativity unleashed; of the importance of self-belief, of taking time out and cherry-picking one’s collaborators.
Buoyed by a band of starry jazz progressives including bassist Daniel Casimir, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Gray and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, with Chineke! – Europe’s only majority Black orchestra – on strings, “Odyssey” is a heroine’s journey in which beauty, danger, groove and spirituality travel paths tested and unknown. Garcia’s knack for balancing slow-building improvisations with catchy hooks and space-hurtling club floor energy is evident, particularly on lead single “The Seer” (complete with its stampeding drums by Sam Jones), her prismatism sparkling inside a project that blends orchestral arrangements with R&B, heavy dub and jazz.
It’s a recording that leaps off the high bar she set with her 2020 solo debut “Source”, a Mercury Music Prize-nominee whose success took Garcia by surprise and got her thinking carefully about her next move.
“I was like, ‘You’ve done it once. Now what?’,” she shrugs. “I’m hella proud of ‘Source’ but I needed time to develop my skills so I could create something elevated, different and just better. You really need to pause if you want to approach honest work.”
Garcia duly spent several months in Brazil, away from touring, social media and “the mega hustle bustle culture” of London, where she grew up, the youngest of four children born to a British-Trinidadian father and a Guyanese mother, in Camden Town. Theirs was a musical household, where records by reggae, rock and Latin music artists, by jazz greats from Charlie Parker to Herbie Hancock, were played on repeat. Where each child learned an instrument at the local Camden Saturday Music Centre. Young Nubya tried violin, piano and clarinet before picking up the sax aged 10.
“I love London and I recognise that it has pushed me, but being away helped give me the perspective I needed to be able to build this world,” says Garcia of “Odyssey”, which features guest vocalists Georgia Anne Muldrow, Richie Seivwright and Esperanza Spalding, and finds Garcia composing, arranging and conducting for strings.
Asked what advice she’d give a creative person thinking of trying something new and different, she flashes a smile. “I’d say run – don’t walk – towards it, because you have no idea who you will be on the other side. You won’t know how much you are capable of until you try.”
A sense of boundary-breaking, of goals met and surpassed, is palpable throughout the new album: “Your journey is yours, full of many twists and turns,” Garcia intones on “Triumphance”, whose lyrics were inspired by the sung stories – of letting go, flying high, owning your purpose – that Muldrow, Seivwright and Spalding constructed around her melodies and instrumentals.
It’s an anything’s-possible aesthetic that was fostered early on in Garcia’s career, legacy of award-winning mentors and teachers such as pianist Nikki Yeoh, who taught her how to improvise (“I had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable”) and saxophonist Vikki Wright (“the only female sax player I knew of”), and Tomorrow’s Warriors, the acclaimed jazz music and artist development organisation committed to nurturing new talent, especially girls and musicians from the West African diaspora.
Like many of Tomorrow’s Warriors alumni, Garcia went on to study music formally (in her case, at Trinity Laban) and tag-team between the bands and players that came to represent London’s much touted young jazz scene: spiritual jazz group Maisha. The all-female Nérija, which featured Maurice-Gray. She had stints in Joe Armon-Jones’ group, in tuba player Theon Cross’s trio, with drummer Moses Boyd – who, like Tomorrow’s Warrior’s co-founder Janine Irons, is here tonight, and recalls seeing Garcia running between festival stages, sax in hand, jumping in with the next group of musician pals.
“The team thing is incredibly important to me,” Garcia, a former gymnast and netball player, has said. As indeed is the notion of mentorship – to that end she has invited students from Camden Music and Tomorrow’s Warriors to visit KEF Music Gallery across the “Odyssey” exhibition week. If just one young musician has their life changed by what they see, it’s job done, she says.
“I want them to walk into this space with its beautiful audio equipment and behind-the-scenes photos and feel excited by possibilities. Maybe in the future they’ll want to make an exhibition or an album. Maybe they’ll think about doing a performance or a tour,” continues Garcia, who’s set to play Japan and Australia – including the 2024 Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
“I’ve had so many amazing teachers and women in my life who have recognised the importance of seeing yourself represented. You can’t do what you can’t see.”
It’s been some journey. What has she learned so far? “That it’s not anything to do with the time it takes,” she says. “We should all go at our own speed.” Another smile. “And that self-belief is one of our greatest powers.”
Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.
Header image: Nubya Garcia. Photo: Danika Lawrence.