Nubya Garcia: “We need to keep those stories alive to give us our history, the real history. In my community, the Black community, that’s really important”

“When you think about the source for something, the root of it, you think about its internal power,” says Nubya Garcia, reflecting on the title of her debut album, released on the Concord Jazz label. “The record is about personal and collective power through reconnection, and educating myself as much as I can about my culture and my history.”

Lately the 29-year-old saxophonist has been thinking about this a lot. “When you’re Black and British you have a different connection to your heritage than your parents do,” she says. “You get to a certain age and you long to figure out where you stand in everything. I just want to learn. What was my great grandma like, what house did you grow up in when you were a kid? I think parents sometimes forget that their kids are interested. They really want to know what came before them, especially when it wasn’t here.”

Identity is countersunk into Garcia’s music. Source is a sonic photograph, a portrait of the artist in 2020 to accompany the portrait of Garcia on the cover: eyes closed, head tilted back, her face framed by strands of hair that look like branching roots or veins or forks of crackling electricity. The ambiguity, I’m sure, is deliberate.

Nubya Garcia and Daniel Casimir as Love Supreme Jazz Festival (photo: Lisa Wormsley)

“All of these tunes can be traced back to roots and connections and history and community,” she explains. “It’s an exploration of what’s at your root and what makes you you. What feeds you to be the best that you can be. It’s identity, it’s family histories, it’s afro-diasporic connections.”

Garcia grew up in North London and was surrounded by music from a young age. She remembers one of her teachers, pianist Nikki Yeoh, telling her ‘you are what you listen to’ and for Garcia that means a bit of everything: jazz of course, and classical music, which she studied alongside her siblings, but also sounds from the Caribbean and Latin America. She reminisces about going to [Notting Hill] Carnival when she was tiny (just three or four) and listening to dub and lovers rock on the speakers at home, so loud it shook the room. You can hear those influences in the swaggering groove of Source’s title track, produced by Garcia and Kwes and mixed with some heavy dub echo. King Tubby would surely approve.

Other tracks lean more towards hip hop and creative R&B and elsewhere there are Latin flavours, not to mention plenty of the punchy melodies and driving dancefloor-focussed grooves that have won Garcia international acclaim, catching the attention of The New York Times and DownBeat, helping to establish her as a poster child for London’s genre-fluid young jazz scene. Last year she won Jazz Act of The Year at the Jazz FM awards. The week before our chat, over Zoom from opposite sides of London, I listened to her on BBC Radio 6 Music covering for Gilles Peterson, one of her many champions. Shortly before that she played a socially-distanced set in front of a herd of grazing friesians and the skeleton of The Pyramid Stage for The Glastonbury Experience. It was a duo with keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, one of her bandmates, along with bassist Daniel Casimir and drummer Sam Jones.

The track titles on Source add further layers to Garcia’s story. ‘Before Us in Demerara & Caura’, featuring Ms Maurice on trumpet, is named after Garcia’s father’s ancestral home in Trinidad and the borough of Georgetown in Guyana where her mother grew up; while ‘The Message Continues’ is a reference to oral tradition. “I think it’s very important for elders to teach youngers their stories, what they’ve been through, what they’ve done, because maybe nobody knows,” says Garcia. “We need to keep those stories alive to give us our history, the real history. In my community, the Black community, that’s really important. The message should continue through the generations. It shouldn’t be hidden or deemed unworthy of sharing.”

As we speak, I’m reminded of a quote by the great writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou: “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.” Music is a powerful means of preserving culture, a defence against erasure and against forgetting. It can be a document and a repository of knowledge. Garcia’s exploration of these issues is personal, but it’s also in step with the time. Recent events, from the Windrush scandal to the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, have brought racism, Black history and identity politics to the forefront of public debate. The statues of slave traders and confederate generals are beginning to fall. The white powers appear to be listening at last.

Nubya Garcia (photo: Adama Jalloh)

I ask Garcia if the current climate has influenced her thinking. “Being a Black woman in this country I don’t think I could avoid it,” she says, “and I wouldn’t want to either. I think it’s important to be part of this movement. These ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time, whether I didn’t know how to voice them... In recent years I’ve just matured, I’ve done reading, I’ve spoken to a lot of people.” There is no off switch, she says. “It lives in my body. I don’t have the luxury of being able to stop wanting equality or to stop thinking about all the things that have happened in the history of my people. The second you learn that inequality exists, and racism exists you don’t un-feel it every time it happens to you.”

I ask if she feels a responsibility to use her platform, to speak out and to reflect issues like these in her music. Is silence betrayal? “I think it will come out in my music because I live it,” she says. “I’m living through this time and you reflect, if you choose to, what you’re living through as a creative. It’s going to be part of my life forever.” She feels cautiously optimistic about the future. “Hope is a dangerous thing but it’s also a beautiful thing and I think we do need that. It’s a crazy time to be alive and see global attitudes changing for the slightly better, but I’m aware that just because people have decided to say that racism exists in all practices, in all parts of the word, in all industries… We’ve just got to the point where maybe that’s starting to happen. We’ve got a long way to go.”

Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic has put Garcia’s life on hold. In the last few years, her success has taken her all round the world. Until the lockdown hit she was on the road for a gruelling 18 months. “I miss it now though, don’t I?” She laughs. She managed to combine touring with some travelling and the music she discovered adds further richness to Source. She went to Cuba to visit her friend singer Daymé Arocena and made several trips to Colombia where she met and recorded with La Perla, a group of vocalist-percussionists who put a fresh spin on Afro-Colombian folk music styles such as cumbia. They feature on one of Source’s standout tracks, ‘La Cumbia Me Está Ilamando’ (‘The Cumbia is Calling Me’), a meditative call-and-response between sax and vocals, grounded by the earthtones of pattering hand drums.

Garcia stayed in Colombia for two months last year and is already desperate to go back.

“Words aren’t really enough,” she sighs. “It was just a feeling of release, being present around such rich music, steeped in a lot of history. Cumbia is infectious to me. I don’t find it easy to stand still.” While she was there she was invited to the remote municipality of Timbiquí near the Pacific coast to watch some traditional celebrations and drink viche (the local moonshine) with the elders of the community. It’s somewhere few Colombians, let alone foreigners, ever get to visit. She didn’t play, but she absorbed a lot. “I was more than happy to be a listener, a learner, someone who wanted to hear all of their stories. Just to be with them.”

All of those experiences have fed into her work. “With Latin music the draw to your body is undeniable. It reaches in deep,” she says. “What I think I’ve learnt from it is different energies and different ways that your body wants to move when you listen to rhythm. What about music makes us move? What makes people want to rave, what makes people want to sway, what makes people want to break out into some serious footwork? I’m still discovering. I learn every gig I do.”

Energy and connection have interested Garcia for a long time and you can hear that in her playing. The first thing that struck me about her was her sound. It’s rich and full. It has impact. When she solos she doesn’t bury you under avalanches of notes, instead she focuses on one or two, squeezing all of the juice out of them before moving on. She latches onto riffs and plays long holds, climbing higher to build the tension, reaching for the next note and the next like she’s hauling herself up a cliff face. The emphasis is on emotional expression, on channelling energy and transmitting it to the listener. Sometimes it sounds like she’s reaching out to you through the speakers.

“I always want people to feel connected,” she says. “I always want to give everything that I can possibly give, what’s honest to me. I love that connection you have with someone, we’re moving together... I strive to make people want to move, because that’s the way I connect with music.”

After graduating from the influential Tomorrow’s Warriors programme, where she met many of her peers and bandmates, Garcia studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. She overcame her natural shyness by making herself go to as many jams as possible (the track ‘Inner Game’ is a reference to the performance anxiety that many musicians experience at some point in their lives). She was developing her sound, and jam nights like Steez in Deptford and The Royal Albert in New Cross, along with Brainchild Festival and Jazz re:freshed, were formative.

“I owe everything to that,” she says. “The way that you connect with people on stage… It was just so welcoming. People were there to be happy, to listen and dance and hang out. There was very little ego compared to other jam sessions. It was a really beautiful, golden bubble of time. We were very lucky to grow up with that. At Steez when you come with jazz standards and you wanna beef them up or do them in a different way you’ve got an open audience. Or you could try your own stuff.” With venue closures and funding cuts, she worries for future generations. “I definitely owe a lot to those smaller venues that we’re losing right now. You need somewhere to start, somewhere to grow.”

Garcia is used to the DIY approach. She released her debut EP, Nubya’s 5ive, through Jazz re:freshed in 2017 and her second, 2018’s When We Are, independently. She still can’t believe she’s signed to Concord. “It’s quite mad to me,” she says, “I’m just one person!” She’s also recorded with Maisha and for Blue Note as one of several UK artists invited to rework a classic track for Blue Note Re:imagined, out next month. Garcia chose Joe Henderson’s ‘A Shade Of Jade’, giving it a clever twist by juxtaposing swing sections, mixed to sound like an old jazz record, with a lazy backbeat feel and contemporary production. On a first listen it had me fooled. I thought she’d used a sample of the original. “Oh sick,” she laughs, “well that’s the biggest compliment ever!”

Joe Henderson is one of her major jazz influences, both his playing and his composing, which Garcia learned a lot from when writing for the septet Nérija, another of her projects. Dexter Gordon was the first tenor player she was “deeply deeply into” and she also had obsessions with Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter (“a G, an absolute legend”) and John Coltrane, of course. “His soul is what gets me,” she says, “that’s what draws me in.” She’s a wise one and doesn’t like to talk about favourites. “All of these people are so unique and they’ve instilled that in me: I don’t want to sound like I’m a disciple of whoever,” she says. “I think it’s really important to sound like me. I want to be able to do whatever I want on the saxophone, which only takes hours and hours of practice. Focus and discipline are a given, but I take things from everyone.”

Ultimately what Garcia wants is “a recognisable voice”, one that reflects her changing interests, “but retains the same soul, the same source, if you will.” She plans to keep travelling and absorbing new sounds while learning more about her culture and history. “I’m at the beginning of that journey and I probably will be for a very long time,” she says. “You’re never going to get to the end of it as long as you live. I think that’s the beauty of it.”

This interview originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today