FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Sixty-One: Nubya Garcia
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I am going to come onto…
PHOTO CREDIT: Adama Jalloh
a couple of reviews for Nubya Garcia’s debut studio album, SOURCE, in a minute. The 2020 release was just nominated for a Mercury Prize. It is a marvellous album that has elements and shades of her Jazz roots while incorporating Dubstep, Reggae, Colombian Cumbia, Calypso, Hip-Hop, Soul and African-Diasporic. The London-born composer, musicians and bandleader is definitely someone who is a modern heroine: a tremendous artist who will influence and inspire other artists for years to come. There are some interviews that are worth bringing together. The Line of Best Fit spoke with her last September. It is interesting to read about her musical background and the connection to her Caribbean roots:
“Some of my earliest memories were watching my older brothers and sisters in their music concerts at school. Those would have been my first experiences of live music. And I was practicing and playing myself, and that’s like young young young. Like 4 or 5.”
“I started on violin and piano and recorder, as you do in school. Then I started playing the saxophone at age 10. I wasn’t enjoying the violin as much. I think saxophone was my main thing from the second I got it.”
Despite growing up in London, Nubya Garcia feels deeply connected to her Caribbean heritage. “Some of my earliest memories are of Notting Hill Carnival and also Trinidad Carnival: such a huge celebration of Black culture within my family and also the wider community. At home it was more reggae, jazz and classical. You know, I didn’t grow up in the Caribbean – I went a lot but I didn’t grow up there – so Carnival has always been my way to tap into my culture.”
This is a culture that Garcia recognises has become part of the vibrant pluralist landscape of her native London and in the UK in general. “There’s such a Caribbean community, and Black community, that’s sharing through music, through food, through dance, through sound system culture, that has been permeated into other UK music, like dance music especially. It’s always been around me in many ways that maybe I didn’t notice at the time, but looking back, I notice that it was always surrounding me, having this culture in music.”
Garcia also grew up exploring the bass music of London’s underground clubs – a sound that has worked its way into the new wave of British jazz. “Rave culture is such a huge part of London and the UK in general,” she says. “When I was a teenager, there was so much music appreciation and so many good nights going on — good dancing nights where they’d be playing like garage and footwork. And obviously like dubstep, but I wasn’t not huge on the dubstep scene because it started to get a bit like… wobbly.”
“So I was discovering all this warehouse, underground culture in my late teens and early 20s, and it had a huge influence on me, because I’ve got that alongside all the other music, alongside jazz, alongside dub and stuff from sound system culture. All of that comes together and it’s just what I hear. I don’t really separate them out in my mind when I’m writing. I’m just thinking ‘this bit would be great with this’ or ‘can it work with this rhythm?’ Because what you have in your head is just what you create.”
And then, of course, there is Garcia’s passion for jazz, incited from an early age by her parents. “My parents took me to a lot of gigs when I was a teenager, and that was really amazing. I think because my parents were just so into music and they also saw that I was getting into it, they really placed a huge importance on actually being in the room with the legends that you’re hearing on the records.” Garcia saw legends like Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman in her early teens. “I can’t even begin to say how those experiences changed the way that I feel about music. That’s the most important thing to me, now: to see music being played and getting to hear it and be present with it”.
Does Garcia prefer working as a bandleader to her already prolific output as a band member? She is unable to say. “I love both. I love to be in the space of being the creator. In my band, I write all the tunes, but I’m quite an open bandleader.” Garcia’s gratitude for her position – so evident throughout our interview – has clearly shaped how she approaches leading her ensemble. “It’s not my way or the highway. So that allows for a really beautiful creative environment. But I also love not having to think of any of the other stuff bandleaders have to think about,” she laughs. “So yeah, I kind of love them equally. I wouldn’t stop doing either one. I value both spaces and the creativity of both.”
Thanks to the freedom that being a bandleader with her notoriety lends her, Garcia is unapologetic in her composition, aiming for self-expression rather than accessibility. “I know how the music industry can be because I’m a consumer as well,” she says. “But as a creator, and a creative, I feel that you’ve got to concentrate on the music before anything else, otherwise you’re tainting it. It’d rather stay in the creative realm as long as possible, and just play music with musicians that I absolutely love to bits”.
You can pre-order SOURCE on vinyl. It is a record that you definitely should investigate. Whether it wins the Mercury Prize or not, Garcia is one of the most important and inspiring artists in music – not only in the field of Jazz. This Jazzwise interview from October is interesting. Again, we discover how the music Garcia is making feeds back to her history and community:
“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.
“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.
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”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Adama Jalloh
Before coming to some reviews, I am going to put in some sections from the interview The Forty-Five conducted last year. Garcia is asked about her parents’ support and whether Jazz is becoming more mainstream:
“How did your parents encourage you to explore music?
My elder siblings always went to music stuff at the weekend, and it was kinda expected that I’d do the same. My mum took me to a lot of gigs when I was younger and placed really high importance on live music, as well as CDs for presents. My mum and my step-dad had quite a lot of records. Not as many as I have now, but a lot when you’re a child and looking up at the shelf like “Woah! That’s a lot”. They were very present in encouraging me to be involved in music.
With so many cuts to art and youth projects across the country, how important was it to you to have access to spaces such as the programme you were part of at The Roundhouse?
Really important. We were probably the last generation who had quite a lot of government support for arts in the communities, and music especially. I was within The Roundhouse for a little bit, and Tomorrow’s Warriors. Loads of things that we probably all took for granted at the time, but knowing that they exist in a very different way now, knowing that the community centres aren’t there, they’ve all been cut, it’s a huge shame. I did a bit of teaching about four or five years ago, after leaving Uni, and it’s just different. Even the structure of lessons – group lessons being a thing to save money. It’s very different now. It’s sad.
What was it like growing up in Camden and being interested in jazz?
I was never really part of the Camden scene that people think of – indie music, rock music, grunge, punk. It wasn’t really what I experienced Camden as. I went down to The Roundhouse and played jazz and I went to The Jazz Cafe and saw stuff and did gigs there. Jazz is this tiny pocket of people interested in that and I think I really came into my own when I found Tomorrow’s Warriors, that community based in Southbank Centre. That was the first time, other than The Roundhouse, that I had been in contact with people my own age who were heavily into jazz. That was really amazing, I felt seen in a different way. And heard.
What was your process when you were making ‘Source’, and how different was it to your previous work?
I’ve been collecting little bits of musical ideas whilst I was on tour last year, when we toured for ages and ages. I didn’t really have a lot of time at home, so I spent a lot of time before and after sound check and in my hotel room trying to play really quietly and not disturbing anyone. Playing around and working out melodies and basslines and keeping my creativity going. That definitely can stop if you don’t keep it charged, because you put everything out there at every single gig. And then when I came back from tour last summer, I had about a week off so I booked a space because working outside the home is really healthy if you have the means to do so.
I’d already booked my album session which is something that I do and helps to get things going for me. I’d done that for all of my EPs, with this one it was on a bigger scale. I had more ideas to flesh out, I put ideas together with ideas, I worked with the guests on the record, I thought of them when I was writing these tunes. This album felt a lot more conceptual than I’d ever thought, or played or written about previously.
What do you think about jazz becoming more mainstream? Some of the more successful musicians aren’t necessarily representative of the community that created this genre.
What is different now is the notion of collaboration. That’s really changing what has happened in the past, which was people coming in, deciding they like something and completely appropriating it. And that’s regardless of music – I’m talking about everything, fashion as well as art, anything. I think it’s important for us to grow and for communities to feel like their voices can be heard. Representation, diversity, this is what everything is about and comes down to. Reflecting the world as it is rather than some people being successful and some people just never getting a leg up because of everything. I kinda struggle with the word ‘mainstream’. I wanna hear as many people collaborate as possible and I think ‘mainstream’ or ‘niche’ excludes people, whereas two people from completely different musical worlds can collaborate on a track and people will really like it, whereas if you say “oh this person’s gone mainstream” or “this person is doing something a bit too niche” it becomes about something else”.
To finish off, I am going to source from some positive reviews for Nubya Garcia’s Mercury Prize-nominated debut. SOURCE is a stunning listening experience from start to finish. This is what CLASH wrote in their review for one of 2020’s best albums:
“With the help of Joe Armon-Jones (keys), Daniel Casimir (bass) and Sam Jones (drums), Garcia incorporates elements of spiritual jazz, latin rhythms and dub effects to create a record of sharp contrasts. The opener, ‘Pace’, sets the tone with a frantic rhythm and busy arrangement, designed to invoke the hyper-stimulated bustle of modern life. The maximalist approach returns on the title track and centrepiece, which meanders through passages of exhilarating cacophony and calm, anchored by Casimir’s alluring dub bassline. But there are also spare, still moments, such as the hypnotic vocal-led ‘La cumbia me esta llamando’ - one of two excellent compositions indebted to the music of South America.
The consistent thread that runs through the album is the exceptional quality of Garcia’s playing, which can be equally taut and forceful as it can be soft and luxurious, and the generosity with which she offers space to her collaborators. Source may be a solo debut but it has community and collective expression at its heart. Garcia allows these songs to ebb and flow without a clear end point in mind, allowing the interplay between her band-members to become this album’s primary draw. She has proven herself to be just as formidable a composer as she is a performer”.
The Line of Best Fit were keen to lend their praise to SOURCE. Not only is there a mixture of sounds and genres; there is this balance of the serene and busy that means the album has this sense of motion, unpredictability and contrast:
“The majesty of a genre who's only sole human vocal input, in the case of Source, comes on the hypnotic and meditative “La cumbia me está llamando”, and closer “Boundless Beings” (ft, Akenya) is the scope for deeper meaning. Within each bar of celebratory, or questioning music, comes the duality of Garcia’s meaning and your own. Feel free to plug the gaps where human voices tend to lead the charge, let the expanse of Garcia’s debut uncover your understanding
Blending warm tones into genteel spasmodic flourishes that, in the same manner as a summer storm, rumble and crash when you least expect it but once the clouds have passed comes that fresh crisp air with warm undertones. Even the moments where Garcia steps back, allowing the rest of the instrumentation, provided by Joe Armon-Jones (keys), Daniel Casimir (double bass) and Sam Jones (drums), to flourish and crash around give a sense to her ability in knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.
The epic titular track, clocking in at just over twelve minutes, and featuring collaborators Ms MAURICE, Cassie Kinoshi and Richie Seivwright (also appearing on “Stand With Each Other”), rides along in a smooth wave. It also proves jazz’ adept nature; where if you aren’t paying attention you’re certainly guaranteed to miss things. But even if you are paying attention the depth of the matter can also be missed - it’s a genre that adapts to your context, and in the instance of Source, Garcia has created an album that wants to help you in any way it can, without overloading your surroundings, or becoming obnoxious in itself.
Delving into fusions of reggae (“Source”), afro-beat (“La cumbia me está llamando”) and everything in between, Garcia triumphantly tries to discover just who she is, while offering that sparkling sound of a world ripe for the taking. Chockful of jazz that embraces you in a familiar feeling, Source is akin to an old friend you may not see for a while, but whenever you do, the world feels that little bit brighter and it’s as if no time has passed at all”.
The amazing Nubya Garcia is an artist who is going to be around for years to come. Such is her talent and vision, I am excited to see where she heads next. I know that other artists look up to Garcia and are being influenced by what she’s doing. Best of luck to hear ahead of the Mercury Prize winner being announced in September. The acclaim that SOURCE has received proves the love that is out there…
FOR Nubya Garcia.