There’s no doubt about it, the British jazz saxophonist Nubya Garcia is on a journey and the audience that packed the Music Hall of Williamsburg last week was lucky to be part of it.
The new album’s title, “Odyssey,” gives the first hint of her quest, which is furthered in song titles such as “The Seer” and “Clarity.” Coming from a tradition of seekers that includes John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders, Garcia has put her own spin on her spiritual leanings, incorporating elements of hip-hop, soul, dub reggae, and even a classical string section.
Garcia’s soulful, joyous set was comprised mostly of tunes from the new album. She performed without the string section or the guest vocals that appear on that disc (one notable cameo comes from esperanza spalding) but sounded superb with her touring band, Sam Jones (drums), Max Luthert (double bass) and Lyle Barton (keyboards). One of the highlights was the quartet’s performance of “Water’s Path,” which, on the LP, is executed solely by the Chineke! Orchestra. (Note to Nubya – please release one of those live performances!)
Garcia got an early start on her career: she was reading music at the age of three. Her older siblings were musicians, and while seeing them with their instruments constantly, she recalls thinking, “When do I get to do it?”
After beginning her musical training with the recorder and moving on to piano and violin, she picked up the saxophone at around 10 years old. “That was when I first got into jazz,” she recalls.
By the time she was studying music in college, she was gigging several times a week in the six or seven different bands she was in, all of which had a foundation in jazz but incorporated all the different sounds that were around.
“I just wanted to play all different kinds of music,” Garcia says. “I listen to loads of stuff – I’m a music lover, that’s what makes me the musician that I am. I respect the music, the melody, the harmony, the rhythm. … I’m a music fan first.”
She started composing her own music around 21 years old, and she’s pretty sure that the first tune she wrote was ‘Open Your Eyes’ for a quintet that she was in at the time. Her audience has enlarged somewhat since then, as she’s gone from playing to “maybe 20 people in a pub” to a massive 26,000 at a festival in Colombia — a gig she wasn’t in ideal shape for.
“I was freshly jet-lagged, I had altitude sickness, and it just looked like a huge sea of people,” she recounts.
For the new album, Garcia started writing for a quartet but then began to think about an idea here and there for additional instruments and ended up putting strings on half the record.
“I’d never been taught how to arrange for strings,” she admits, “but I wanted that sound – those timbres. It’s funny that I’ve been listening to classical music lately because I didn’t like it when I was young.”
And she adds, “It was an absolute blessing to work with that orchestra; they were incredible musicians.”
Although she’s a bit tired of being asked about being a woman sax player in a male-dominated world of jazz, she graciously indulges us.
“Yes, there’s a massive glass ceiling to push against,” she notes. “To do that, you have to have a great amount of tenacity and the right people around you. It’s been a problem since the beginning of the 1900s.”
As for her place in jazz history, she thinks about it often.
“I’m not trying to be a carbon copy of anyone else; I would like to know that I sound like me,” she shares. “There’s a shared language and lineage and legacy of many, many musicians that came before me that I am lucky enough to have been raised in through the records, seeing the gigs, through college, hearing it from my peers. Music is a transcendental experience, and to be amongst these incredible musicians who are alive and those who are no longer with us is a privilege.”
As for what she hopes her audience takes away with them (besides maybe a t-shirt or a signed LP), Garcia muses, “I just want them to feel it in whatever way feels natural to them. Seeing and hearing music made is such an important place to process things. Listening to live music with other people is something that you cannot recreate – there’s nothing else like that. As human beings, we need that connection. … I want people to be seen and heard and connected.”
Nubya Garcia is online at nubyagarcia.com and on Instagram at @nubya_garcia.
